Twitter is working on giving people the ability to reply to tweets with a whole new tweet thread of their own, according to Twitter code spelunker Jane Manchun Wong.
In a tweet posted today, the engineer shares a screenshot of a new interface that looks to allow people to add their own tweet thread as a reply to an existing tweet. While threads are not new to Twitter, they’re only currently available to those starting a new thread afresh. Anyone replying to a tweet is limited to just the one — or manually threading the tweet themselves.
That all looks set to change in the future.
While on the face of it this seems like a grand idea, there are questions that need to be asked. One would be surrounding notifications — would Twitter only send one notification for the initial reply and then have users only see the thread once they open Twitter on their iPhone or web, for example? That seems the most obvious implementation, but we’ll need to wait for Twitter to announce something official before we know for sure. It also isn’t clear how third-party apps would handle these replies, either.
As is always the case with these things however, nothing is confirmed until Twitter makes an official announcement itself. However, being able to send a multi-tweet response is something that many would likely benefit from — although the threat of mansplainers being given an easier way to bombard people with their responses is something we should all probably expect to become a problem.
