Twitter rolls out Tweet reply control to users - Here's how to

In a bid to give users better control over their Tweet-conversations on the platform, Twitter has made its reply-limiting feature available to all users. Quite simply, the new feature allows Twitter users to decide on who gets to reply to their tweets. However, users who can’t reply to a tweet will still be able to view, retweet, retweet with comment, share, and like the tweet. 

Evidently, the whole idea, which has been in the works for a quite a few months, is to keep in leash spam, slander and abuse that has been an issue of concern on the platform. 

"People who face abuse find these settings helpful – those who have submitted abuse reports are 3x more likely to use these settings," Twitter's director of product management, Suzanne Xie, wrote in a blog post, even as she said that this was being tested since May last.

As she notes, people who face abuse find these settings helpful – those who have submitted abuse reports are 3x more likely to use these settings. 

Here’s how you can control who replies to your Tweets with Twitter’s new conversation settings:

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How to limit replies to a tweet?

In twitter's own words, this is how it works. 

Before you Tweet, choose who can reply with three options:

1) everyone (standard Twitter, and the default setting) 

2) only people you follow or 

3) only people you mention. 

Tweets with the latter two settings will be labeled and the reply icon will be grayed out for people who can’t reply. People who can’t reply will still be able to view, retweet, retweet with comment, share, and like these Tweets.

How to choose: who you can reply to 

Twitter is also working on additional improvements for the new setting, including the capacity to invite people into the conversation after it starts, which could enable users to build on engaging discussions over time, without having to begin a new thread.

And this is how to do it:

From the compose screen, you can see the people in the conversation you will reply to. Click or tap Replying to… to bring up an editing screen with a list of everyone who is a part of the conversation. Up to 50 people who are in the conversation will be displayed. 

1) For adding people to a conversation: Swipe down to close the editing screen, and then simply type their username into your Tweet.

2) For removing people from a conversation: To remove people from the conversation in the editing screen, simply click or tap on the checkmark icon to deselect participants. Once someone is unselected, the checkmark icon will be unchecked.

3) Blocked accounts: Accounts you have blocked will be visible to you in the recipient list, and will indicate that you have blocked them. From the editing screen, you can choose to remove the blocked account from the conversation by clicking or tapping on the checkmark icon.

How to view participants of a conversation

You can also view participants of a conversation from Tweets you see in your Home timeline, profile page, notifications, or from a Tweet detail. 

To view participants’ names, bio, and @usernames:

1) Click or tap Replying to... 

2) From here you can see everyone who is included in this reply. You can also follow or unfollow people in this list.

Just like you can see the total number of likes and Retweets for any Tweet, you can also see how many people are participating in the conversation by the reply count. You’ll see a number next to the reply icon indicating how many direct replies the original Tweet has received. 

Roll out spree

Impelled by the market, Twitter is trying out a variety of changes.

After Fleets it had another feature that prompted users to read the story before retweeting it. Twitter then was said to test out a feature to allow users to respond with emojis on the regular timeline. Then it was audio tweets for iOS users.  Twitter also released a new list search option to all users to help them discover new lists and add them to their feed.

Also, after launching a slew of new features, the popular social networking service set out on the project to launch a subscription platform that may allow special features for paid users.

Twitter while looking ahead has announced that it will roll out a new version of its developer API that is built from scratch and will include a lot of missing features.

Twitter is also testing a new splash screen.

Amidst all this, Twitter is also caught in a major hacking imbroglio.

• Massive Twitter hack was caused by spear-phishing attack