After rolling out the option for the better part of last year, Twitter now gives all users the ability to “opt out” of a Twitter chat, allowing users to disable links to their profile in conversations they no longer feel comfortable with to participate .
Sometimes you want to see yourself outside.
Take control of your mentions and leave a conversation with Unmentioning, now available to everyone on all devices. pic.twitter.com/Be8BlotElX
— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) July 11, 2022
As you can see in this example, if you don’t mention yourself from a chat, you’ll see that:
- Your username is not tagged from the original tweet and replies
- Users will not be able to mention you again in the same reply thread
- You will no longer be notified of exchange updates
Your username will still appear in text form in the original tweets you participated in, but you won’t be an active part of the exchange once the unmention is active.
The main focus here is to enable users to avoid those dreaded Twitter pile-ups, where your tweet or profile becomes the focus of the ire of many, many users, very quickly, which can become incredibly fast.
You can feel like you’re losing control and out of context – which on Twitter you probably are, and as the replies increase, this can heighten anxiety about how you’re being perceived, who’s seeing those replies, what people are saying about you, etc. .n.
So now you can disassociate yourself from any such engagement and move on from it – as anyone else on Twitter will within a few hours – while this can also be useful for examples like the one above when people call you idiot for whatever reason and you just don’t have enough room to engage.
It’s essentially the same as the “Remove tag from photo” option available in various social apps, but for chats instead, allowing users to distance themselves from any direct connection to selected Tweet discussions, helping to manage their in-app experience.
Although in practice, this may be seen by some as ignoring critical interactions and potentially avoiding responsibility for your comments. And maybe in some cases that will also be true, but the principle here is that users should have the capacity to decide whether and how to deal with such in the application.
Twitter has added a range of safety tools like this in recent months, including Tweet audience controls, Circles for more private Tweet discussion, Safety Mode, Communities, and more.
Each of these tools provides more ways for users to manage their app experience.
And while they also feel a bit alien to Twitter, which has always been about open conversation, the bottom line again is that they’re really putting more power in the hands of users, which can help improve people’s experiences.
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