Twitter is shelving its threaded replies feature for the time being in response to negative user feedback about its design, the company announced on Thursday.
“We asked and you let us know this reply layout wasn’t it, as it was harder to read and join conversations,” Twitter said in a thread announcing the change.
The company’s prototype app Twttr, its testing ground for experimenting with new designs like threaded replies, will also be going dark while it workshops “new conversation features.” Anyone currently using the app will lose access and should switch to the main Twitter app, it warned.
Twitter began rolling out threaded replies back in May on iOS and the web to help make conversations easier to participate in as users would no longer have to navigate a mess of branching replies, something even Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has struggled with. This new system apparently didn’t prove much better, though, as Twitter said that users still found it difficult to follow along in conversations, in part because the feature’s design didn’t include enough context about who they were talking to.
Moving forward, Twitter said it’s working to address this feedback by adding more context to the layout for replies and broadening the platform’s range of conversation settings to give users more control. Twitter didn’t say when users can expect to see any of its new design ventures reflected on their timelines and didn’t immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment on the matter. In Thursday’s thread, Twitter promised there’d be “more to come soon.”
“When building new features, especially those that are essential to the Twitter experience, we try new things often,” the company tweeted. “Some will ship and others won’t. While testing in the open, your feedback helps us understand what’s working, and what’s not.”
One important question though: Will Twitter’s divisive new Instagram Stories-like feature get the same “back to the drawing board” treatment in a few months? Asking for a friend.