Twitter launches its ‘Hide Replies’ feature in the US and Japan

People will use it differently. If you use it to tune out noise, nobody will bother to check in yours. If you use it to quell rational dissent, then it will be the go to place for the juice.

I bet it'll work.

First, I think most of the time the hidden content is going to be very low-quality (and thus not gratifying to explore), rather than "juicy", and users will quickly learn that.

Second, it puts a huge damper on the gratification of stirring sh#t and getting a bunch of activity, notifications, and subs as a reward. Instead, when you stir the pot, you find yourself ushered to a closet by yourself. It's not locked, but you're definitely not the life of the party anymore.

The result is a social force– an adjustment to incentives— that keeps conversations on-topic and civil. Really, I think it's missing the point to frame it as a tool for silencing critics with dissenting opinions, instead of a tool for silencing people who want to call you an ${inflammatory_statement} in your thread about a cake you baked today.

As I understand it, as your follower count goes up on Twitter, the latter problem gets almost untenable to handle because the strategy of coat-tailing high visibility accounts by sh#t-stirring in their threads is currently so unambiguously effective.

Time will tell what effect this has, but I am hopeful that it will have a large positive impact. (I think the problem demands action no less decisive and significant than this).

I think that this is kind of a good thing. If you abuse the "hide tweets" feature to block people giving fair criticism, you'll probably get called out on it. But if you use it only to hide true garbage replies, then no one will care. The fact that other people can see what you've hidden adds a sort of accountability to the system, which to me seems like potentially a good thing.

It seems like a good compromise between entirely open discussion (where people can troll without consequence) and a Facebook-like system (where people can silence all dissent on their page). But who knows -- we'll have to see how it actually works in practice.

> That said, while Twitter seems to be incredibly slow at introducing new features, the trade off is that what they do push out often ends up being a good thing.

I find most new Twitter features to be worse than useless:

• "Like" was turned into "algorithmic retweet". Now I can't like a tweet without some percentage of my followers seeing it. This is also a problem when I follow others. I can disable seeing their retweets but I can't disable seeing their likes. I've had several people tell me that they unfollowed me because of tweets I liked. I've done the same to others.

• My timeline now shows tweets from people I don't follow. Above the tweet is something like, "Tim Urban and 8 others follow...", and then there will be a tweet by someone who I really don't want to follow (such as Ben Shapiro). There seems to be no way to disable this feature.

• Quote retweet is a great way to encourage flamewars. Long ago, people could not retweet with a message. That meant that people were less likely to retweet something they found inflammatory because their followers might think they agreed with it. Quote retweet means they can preface it with, "Look at what this terrible person said." That's a great way to encourage the Toxoplasma of Rage[1].

Overall, the effect of these features has been to reduce my Twitter usage. Now I mostly go there for a couple of group DMs.

1. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage...

Yes, I say that happen.

An account reposted a tweet as their own and then hid all the Replies flagging it as stolen content.

> At least when you report, block, or mute someone, no one else knows that you were bothered (or, as trolls like to say, “triggered”).

That’s not really anonymous. For example when someone reports a tweet, Twitter also sends a message to the concerned person to let them know someone reported them, even if they didn’t take any action. In case of cyberbullying, the abusers can use the Twitter report as a tool to add more drama and pour oil onto the fire.

> Like in HN, when it says [dead], I have to read it, to see whether I agree with it being [dead] or not ;-)

And if you don't, vouch for it :)

> First thing I do when I see "more replies" is click on it, knowing this is where the juicy stuff or counter argument is.

Exactly, which is why I don't understand this feature. If you can't really hide replies, only instead call attention to the replies you've "hidden", what is the point of it?

Trump will hide all the tweets against him. Not sure how this is a good feature.

What about when the misinformation/propaganda/etc. is in a reply instead of in an original tweet? Two-sided sword, as they say.

"Prepare for unforseen consequences."

ALL propaganda agencies are going to love this. State or industry. Pepsi or Joe Biden.

Politics about any specific country or group aside, this would be a win for Twitter. Extra engagement from both sides. People who write crazy things return to moderate comments. People that comment write more comments because old comments are hidden. After comments are hidden, someone will probably start their own tweet about how that other tweet is full of garbage.

It's just more gasoline for twitter's business model: Drive engagement through flamewars.

Kinda like a website that is limited to 160 characters. Never fell in love with Twitter and looking at the top trends I often feel like wasting time on that platform.

But I agree that Twitter is basically an attention distributor. I get the impression that Twitter focuses its ambition to pander to self-expression and many topics that could have been interesting degrade to something that feels even worse than cheap PR.

Sadly, however that happened, Twitter became a platform to advertise political positions. That is probably why so many people see such features with mixed feelings.

I disagree that people make debits by replying, even if it is done in bad faith. If you put something out there, you are likely doing that yourself and nobody takes anything away. By hiding something you take something away from readers.

#iAmAgainstEverythingThatHappensOnTwitter

When people started using emoji to express themselves, I thought it couldn't get any worse... then came the reaction gif.

Just browse giphy. But be careful. You never know what you'll find there.

As a lizard, I find that offensive! ;-)

The reason Twitter became big was coincidental more than anything else. It became the defacto tool used in the Iranian protests against Ahmedinejad in summer 2009 (and again in 2011 during the ME-wide uprisings) as the regime had blocked Facebook to keep a lid on international awareness. The use of Twitter gathered a ton of foreign media attention as there was no other source of primary information.

And almost overnight, Twitter went from an obscure "microblog" (nobody's used that term in years) to "the pulse of what's happening now".

The cable news media (and digital media startups a few years later) were a willing partner in its rise. Embedding people's tweets in their stories gave them the ability to generate "news" to fill their 24-hour programming at a fraction of the cost of doing investigative journalism. The latter is by its nature lengthy, wrapped in secrecy and doesn't always result in a scoop. Basically all the things that a ratings and ad-driven industry couldn't care less about.

I've never been into twitter either. There's a lot of content there though, I'll visit the site from time to time if another site links to it, but that's pretty much it.

Politics on twitter is just a shouting match. Most tech related things are just kind of link-sharing (sometimes people post lengthy bits of tech info, I can't understand why). Twitter does seem to be a decent venue for breaking sports news, but that news usually finds its way elsewhere quickly.

You should hop off hackernews then and find some grey beards to hang with

If you comment on their tweets, yes. If you just tweet something out, Comcast can't hide it (yet).

The url changes a few times while scrolling.

Would be semi-impossible given that half the comments shown on a Twitter “thread” aren’t really comment-objects, but rather just their own tweets sitting on someone else’s timeline that have @ed you in them and twitter figured out which thread to attach them to by heuristic. Sure, in theory, you could turn off the heuristic—but you’d still see them just fine if you did a global search for your @handle.

Or are you suggesting disallowing what is essentially “allowing people to refer to you on their own blogs”?

Trial-marketing. Twitter users generally tend to form relationship (follow/see/RT)-graphs stick within language boundaries (and to a lesser-extent, national identity boundaries) - by using language or region as a proxy for a "clean" subset of users you can get some experimental results that you won't get by using random user selection, for example. Also, users unaffected by this change will still be able to see other users' replies and could then share screenshots of said replies which would defeat the point of this exercise - by using language boundaries means it's less likely that such a thing would happen (e.g. if this was Sweden and Norway instead of US+Japan, would you really bother to go through Swedish tweets to find replies for other users?)

In short: it sounds like they're uncertain about pushing this change through on everyone, and want to trial it first.

Twitter has gone-back on ideas they've thrown around before - like when they said they would hide other users' tweets' Like +RT counts.

It will be used to hide legitimate criticisms of political tweets mainly. This is a win for capital protection, nothing more.

Bot time.

I would imagine so. As long as you don't block people (so they can't see your stuff when logged in, or reply under that handle), I don't think there are any potential legal issues. They can say anything they want, and anyone else can see anything anyone said (if they click through to see it). So it's a minor inconvenience, but I don't think this presents the same issue as blocking others.