Twitter seeking input as it explores Filter and Limit controls on tweets
FWIW, the core thing to me is that if I hide a reply to one of my tweets, it should actually not be seen by people who started from my tweet... certainly not by people who didn&#x27;t even follow the person who left the reply. This is the feature that is really needed to help deal with horrible people, not a centralized filter mechanism for &quot;offensive content&quot; that will result in some weirdly-biased censorship.<p>The issue is that when people reply to my tweets, they are trying to use my audience to push their message. If they have their own followers, OK: that&#x27;s them talking to their people. But they want to talk to <i>my</i> audience. And they might have something shitty or spammy to say, and their coming back to my threads to say it hurts my ability to communicate with my audience.<p>So, Twitter finally gave us a feature to hide these replies, which was <i>almost</i> great... except somehow it does the opposite?! It takes the message, which might have, in practice, been semi-buried in a pile of a hundred replies, and <i>elevates it</i> by giving the hidden replies a special icon and their own panel. I wanted to <i>hide</i> the hate speech, not feature it!<p>To make it even more ridiculous, users often get a pop-up a box to remind then &quot;hey you can find the hidden replies here&quot;... it frankly totally undermines the point of the feature. If I hid it, it should be <i>hidden</i>... at least from people who started from my tweets, and at least if they don&#x27;t follow the person who posted the message (I don&#x27;t want to limit the ability for people to communicate with their own followers).<p>(FWIW, I hopefully-clearly totally feel for the premise that Twitter should be something of a utility and that people should get to communicate with people who opted-in to what they had to say, but this ability to reply to someone else&#x27;s message isn&#x27;t that. If you have further consistency issues with my premise, I will note that in a system I would personally design, all replies would be hidden by default and users would have to manually mark them as visible to their audience, at which point they would take on the moral responsibility for the content, at which point I believe you could have truly uncensored follower-to-user and user-to-follower interaction, which I think should be a goal. I only really say any of this, though, to make my complaint consistent with my past complaints: I currently consider the premise of this complaint to stand-alone and be consistent with itself given the reason this feature theoretically exists, which it seems to not satisfy... it was like a half-assed mistake of a mitigation, and now we are seeing them start to play whack-a-mole.)