Twitter to Launch 'Hide Replies' Feature in June

I remember being 5 years old and only wanting to hear opinions that agreed with my own. Whenever Mommy didn't agree that we should have ice cream for dinner it really bothered me. Wish I could have had a feature like this back then. Thank you Twitter, all the 5-year-olds of the world will love you for this!

Please Twitter, just die already.

Doesn't this kind of defeat the purpose of Twitter? Showing only people that agree with you in a thread doesn't really seem like an effective method of conversation.

Isn't it how most social media works? If someone posts something on your Facebook wall/feed, can't you hide or delete it? Same with moderation on YouTube. If you post something that violates MR's TOS, won't they moderate away your comment?

As someone that puts up with a lot of abusive people on Twitter as part of my job, I think the problem they're trying to address is the mobbing, where a relatively small number of people try to stir up outrage at you or your company.

Like, we had one influencer-type who was angry because we wouldn't give him free stuff so he used his audience to create all of this negative backlash all over our Twitter feed. Post-incident analysis showed that 75% of the people bashing our product, were posting from accounts where the person listed themselves as residing outside of the US, thus, they had never used our product and were simply jumping on the bandwagon.

It really does put people/companies in a weird situation where people can extort you, openly and publicly, but Twitter does not give you the tools to defend yourself. If you respond, you are basically highlighting this person to all of your followers who may not have even been aware of the controversy. So, your best option is to say nothing, which often adds fuel to the fire for not responding (silence = guilt in internet arguments).

Ultimately, moderation tools will either be used honestly or they won't and those that choose to moderate so that only people that agree with you or support you are allowed to comment, you'll end up destroying your own brand/reputation. But if you are able to use these tools to stop people from abusing you or trying to extort things from you, the only people that are going to get upset by it are jerks anyway.

Nice, I've always wanted to curate reactions to my opinions.

Doesn't this kind of defeat the purpose of Twitter? Showing only people that agree with you in a thread doesn't really seem like an effective method of conversation.