Twitter may not be one of the first companies you think of when it comes to CES, but today it announced a major new feature that's coming soon to the platform.
Twitter is working on something called "Conversation Participants". With it, you'll be able to choose who can reply to a particular tweet of yours: Global, Group, Panel, or Statement, reports The Verge.
The Global setting means that anyone will be able to reply to your tweet. Group will limit the ability to reply to just people you follow and those you mention, and Panel will limit replies to just the people you mention in the tweet. Finally, Statement will prevent anyone from replying to a tweet you send.
"Getting ratio'd, getting dunked on, the dynamics that happen that we think aren't as healthy are definitely part of...our thinking about this," explained Suzanne Xie, Twitter's director of product management.
Conversation Participants is currently being worked on at Twitter, and the first experiment is expected to roll out in the first quarter of the year. A full launch will happen later in 2020.
As Twitter currently works, anyone can reply to your tweets so long as your profile is public, though the platform does let you hide replies so that they're not immediately visible. The new Conversation Participants feature is a much bigger move that seems to be aimed at curbing abuse. With it, you can choose to limit replies or prevent them altogether, meaning random people who see your tweet won't be able to chime in.
Twitter also teased a new conversation view today that aims to put an entire conversation "on one screen". It'll include lines to help you find your way through all the replies and will also specifically highlight the authors. It'll arrive in the Twitter app in the coming months.
