The ultimate goal of the internet, or rather Twitter, is to shitpost your way into the sunset. And if you’re hesitant to do it on your main profile currently, Twitter is exploring new ways you do that without thinking about damage to your public image.
A designer from the Twitter team showed some concepts that depict different profiles — called “Facets” — for different kinds of tweeting. The first idea shows a user named Brad with different profiles such as Brad, Brad at work, and Daddy Braddy (which is a private profile mode). Followers can follow your whole profile, or specific Facets.
Ever want to Tweet, but not to everybody?
We’re exploring a bunch of ways to control who can see your Tweets. Here are two early ideas (we’re not building these yet).
I’d love your feedback! 🧵⬇️ pic.twitter.com/o1lmAQBlnt
— A Designer (@a_dsgnr) July 1, 2021
If you tweet about football and tech, some people might be interested in only one topic, so Facets could help them avoid other nonsense from you.
The second idea is more akin to the Close Friends feature on Instagram. In this concept, you can choose a circle of trusted friends and your tweets would only show up to them. Plus, you could also prioritize tweets from that group to appear before others on your timeline.
We hear y’all, toggling your Tweets from public to protected, juggling alt accounts. It could be simpler to talk to who you want, when you want.
With Trusted Friends, you could Tweet to a group of your choosing. Perhaps you could also see trusted friends’ Tweets first. pic.twitter.com/YxBPkEESfo
— A Designer (@a_dsgnr) July 1, 2021
This is to avoid the hassle of making you create new secret accounts or switching your profile to a protected one.
This is another step in Twitter’s realizing that you might not want to talk to everyone all the time. Last year, the company rolled out a limiting reply feature. Plus, the company has considered working on an “unmention” feature that lets you untag yourself from a conversation.
The social network is also thinking about reducing abuse in replies. The aforementioned designer showed a concept where Twitter will highlight profanities when you’re forming a reply, and ask you to reconsider your response.
Here’s how it’d work:
• Authors choose the phrases they prefer not to see
• These phrases are highlighted as ppl write replies; ppl can learn why, or ignore the guidance
• Authors can enable automatic actions, like moving violating replies to the bottom of the convo pic.twitter.com/VzxU6D7eMf— A Designer (@a_dsgnr) July 1, 2021
Notably, in May, Twitter rolled out a feature that detects profanities or hateful language in a reply, and shows you a pop-up, requesting you to be more polite. The new concept takes this idea and applies it to the stage when you haven’t hit the send button.
Most of these ideas are just in the concept phase and Twitter is not building any of them yet. However, I’d just like to see them try different profiles.
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