Twitter has very quietly taken down its warnings for heated or controversial conversations, meant to help individuals from not walking into a potentially triggering situation.
The feature was introduced very recently, on the 6th of October, a mere 10 days past. The intention of these conversation prompts was to give users the chance to back out of a potentially stressful situation before ever joining it in the first place. As always, there was a typical wave of users calling Twitter out for catering to soft, easily hurt "snowflakes" or whatever else makes such individuals feel better about themselves. This author, as a matter of fact, remarked about the new feature being a potentially good thing for the platform. Twitter, by virtue of being a site where millions of opinions are offered as part of the norm, has always been a site of toxic, unhelpful vitriol. Offering users the choice to not engage with that part of the platform was, in my opinion, inspired. Allow users an out while also not stifling the concept of free speech. Everyone wins, right?
Well, not Twitter apparently. A report by Bloomberg's Kurt Wagner states that the reason the microblogging platform discontinued it was because of a lack of user response and interaction. The feature, while not having been fully rolled out, had still not reached levels of engagement that would justify its existence. And just like that, yet another Twitter feature gets added to the pile of "meticulously planned out and designed features that were ultimately dropped." It shares that pile with share tweet prompts, limiting replies, and the infamous one year testing of conversation threads. It seems like Twitter really like being meticulously planning our every part of a feature except for the one where people will like it.
At any rate, the heated debate prompts won't necessarily be retired forever. There's even a very good chance that Twitter might end up reintroducing the feature down the line. However, maybe there's a good reason as to why the prompts failed in the first place. Twitter is a place where users actively log into in order to both conduct discussions and catch up on the daily news. A prompt such as this should only limit users looking to do the former.
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The feature was introduced very recently, on the 6th of October, a mere 10 days past. The intention of these conversation prompts was to give users the chance to back out of a potentially stressful situation before ever joining it in the first place. As always, there was a typical wave of users calling Twitter out for catering to soft, easily hurt "snowflakes" or whatever else makes such individuals feel better about themselves. This author, as a matter of fact, remarked about the new feature being a potentially good thing for the platform. Twitter, by virtue of being a site where millions of opinions are offered as part of the norm, has always been a site of toxic, unhelpful vitriol. Offering users the choice to not engage with that part of the platform was, in my opinion, inspired. Allow users an out while also not stifling the concept of free speech. Everyone wins, right?
Well, not Twitter apparently. A report by Bloomberg's Kurt Wagner states that the reason the microblogging platform discontinued it was because of a lack of user response and interaction. The feature, while not having been fully rolled out, had still not reached levels of engagement that would justify its existence. And just like that, yet another Twitter feature gets added to the pile of "meticulously planned out and designed features that were ultimately dropped." It shares that pile with share tweet prompts, limiting replies, and the infamous one year testing of conversation threads. It seems like Twitter really like being meticulously planning our every part of a feature except for the one where people will like it.
At any rate, the heated debate prompts won't necessarily be retired forever. There's even a very good chance that Twitter might end up reintroducing the feature down the line. However, maybe there's a good reason as to why the prompts failed in the first place. Twitter is a place where users actively log into in order to both conduct discussions and catch up on the daily news. A prompt such as this should only limit users looking to do the former.
Read next: A quarter-million US residents have no access to the internet, every 1 of 4 is out of the internet in southern states