Twitter has announced it is adding a new setting for conversation participants right on the compose screen.
Twitter’s director of product management, Suzanne Xie today made this known at a CES event.
Xie explained that the new setting will offer four options: “Global, Group, Panel, and Statement.”
Global lets anybody reply, Group is for people you follow and mention, Panel is people you specifically mention in the tweet, and Statement simply allows you to post a tweet and receive no replies.
According to Xie, Twitter is also “in the process of doing research on the feature” and that “the mockups are going to be part of an experiment we’re going to run” in the first quarter. It will take learnings from that experiment and use them to launch the feature globally later this year.
Xie said, “Getting ratio’d, getting dunked on, the dynamics that happen that we think aren’t as healthy are definitely part of … our thinking about this.”
When asked if there’s a concern if the ability to limit replies could mean misinformation couldn’t be as easily rebutted, Xie gestured to the ability to quote tweet as one possible resolution, but that it’s “something we’re going to be watching really closely as we experiment.”
Xie also revealed that one of her colleagues Casey Newton characterizes the move as “narrowcasting” of tweets.
Twitter wants to give users the option to limit the spread of their tweets. Twitter’s solution is a more interesting middle ground between public and private, focused on the distribution of the tweet instead of permissions to see it.
The social media platform is also adding another feature which could have an effect on threading. The goal is to put all of a conversation “on one screen.” The screen has lines meant to easily lead you through replies and also calls out specific authors.
Xie says that the conversation interface that was initially trialed in the “little t” public prototype beta app will come to the main Twitter app in the coming months.