Twitter launches its ‘Hide Replies’ feature in the US and Japan
This is to me seems like a very counterintuitive “feature” — at least on paper. Hiding tweets seems akin to telling the whole world, “here are tweets from my critics I dislike so much I’m going out of my way to suppress them”. At least when you report, block, or mute someone, no one else knows that you were bothered (or, as trolls like to say, “triggered”).<p>It’s not the same like being downvoted on HN or reddit, where the vote to suppress is a community&#x2F;crowd decision. If Taylor Swift hides a tweet, you are inherently curious to know what rando’s tweet managed to hurt or anger Swift (or her social media minder).<p>That said, while Twitter seems to be incredibly slow at introducing new features, the trade off is that what they <i>do</i> push out often ends up being a good thing. The survey evidence cited in the article seems flimsy, but I give Twitter some benefit of the doubt that they wouldn’t push an obviously destructive feature.