A new Twitter update makes it easier for users to follow up their dumb, old tweets via a “Continue thread” menu, allowing users to continue a thread without actually having to navigate to the tweet in question.
It’s pretty simple. Instead of going to the actual tweet and clicking reply, users can click a drop-down menu when writing a new tweet and select an older tweet they’d like to create a reply to. This isn’t a massive change—there’s no new functionality allowing users to link together older tweets into a thread, for example—but it should save a few clicks here and there. Twitter illustrated the change in a GIF:
Now you can add a Tweet to one you already Tweeted, faster! pic.twitter.com/j3ktAN6t5o
— Twitter (@Twitter) February 19, 2020
This follows on a 2017 update that allowed users to send out an entire thread of tweets at once, rather than being forced to manually enter them one by one. None of these changes fundamentally alter the Twitter ecosystem; they just make it incrementally easier to participate—which could be generally described as a bad idea, but whatever.
Twitter also recently fixed a bug with its MacOS app that resulted in messed-up notifications, and many users apparently only recently discovered it was possible to mute a word directly from a tweet in iOS by highlighting the word and clicking “Mute” on a context menu. (This doesn’t appear to be the case in the Android app, where clicking the body of a tweet just copies it to the clipboard.) Long asked for features like an edit button—which users constantly demand, despite all the possibilities for platform-breaking mischief—remain nowhere to be seen. Other teased updates, like a major update that would make Twitter look pretty much like Facebook and hide metrics for retweet and favourite counts, remain ephemeral for now. But it’s still running ads for things like possibly illicit organ-buying services and Bitcoin scams, just in case you needed a reminder of Twitter’s main priorities.