Over the past couple of weeks I have been talking about TikTok, but it’s not the only platform that has had some massive changes recently. According to my screen-time I normally spend at least 2 hours scrolling through Twitter- despite only following a small number of people. I’m always interested in how Twitter can become a better platform; it’s had its controversies, and normally controversies of all kinds explode on Twitter (The Beauty Guru community I am looking at you.)
In the past couple of months Twitter has updated giving us some new features that can change the way the platform works altogether. The first one has only been released to some accounts and allows users to decide who they want replies from.
Originally, anyone could reply to you on Twitter but this new test coming out makes sure users can choose whether they want certain people to reply or not. You can change the settings to allows replies from everyone, the people who follow you or just the people you tag.
One downside to this mentioned by The Verge is that conversations can’t flow. One of the amazing things about Twitter is the ability to tweet something and have conversations with people all over the world about it. By having this feature, these conversations can’t be opened up to everyone, and can make it hard for people who are starting out.
It does make ‘threads’, a common trend on Twitter much easier to follow and reach. There’s been plenty of times where I’ve gone to read a thread and it’s been broken up due to the amount of replies.
Limiting the replies could also ensure that less spoilers for TV shows and Games aren’t ruining it for fans. The Last of Us 2 has been on everyone’s mind and lips for the past week or so and as a fan, I’m always careful scrolling through my timeline to make sure nothing is spoilt for me. This feature makes sure that people can’t reply to Naughty Dog or any other company/ show.
A massive downside is misinformation. We’ve all seen some of the Tweets made by famous people and politicians that can have damaging results and allowing them to stop any replies will only increase the damage. If any were to spread information, it becomes a lot more believable when there aren’t thousands of people in the ‘comments’ telling you it’s wrong. It can be used as a weapon to get a damaging, untrue information out there.
The latest release Twitter have let loose is a brand-new voice feature. Beyond the 280 characters you can now send your very own voice tweets. This is something I never thought would happen, and definitely seems like a new pathway Twitter are delving into.
The feature is supposed to add a more human touch to the platform, something I’m all about. There’s so much that can be taken out of text or interpreted the wrong way; so voice tweets can remove this.
One question I’ve been seeing coming up is how Twitter are going to monitor what is being said; We’ve seen in the past Twitter miss the mark on monitoring text tweets and so this adds another layer of monitoring the platform will have to keep control of. Business Insider explains that “Women, people of color, and members of the LGBTQ community have detailed experiences over the years of putting up with abusive language, targeted harassment campaigns, and death threats.”
It also poses questions for those hard of hearing of deaf as there is no captions available. This could be something coming into effect as Twitter has users compose descriptions of visual content for those who are blind or have low vision.
For now, all we know is that a limited amount of people having the ability of ‘voice notes’ and everyone should be able to have this feature in the next few weeks.
It’s safe to say Twitter is releasing some big changes to the platform that could change the way in Twitter is thought about and used by pretty much everyone. The voice tweets is definitely something I will be keeping an eye out on; specifically how monitoring is going to happen and how well it’s happening. Twitter has always been one of my favourite platforms and the new features I believe will push the platform to potential new markets.
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