Conversations surrounding a Tweet, particularly if they’ve sparked lots of replies and disparate conversations, can be hard to follow. Thus, in an attempt to make your tweeting experience better, Twitter has quietly announced certain changes to how conversations are shown on the Tweet page, so as to make them easier for you to follow.
Twitter’s latest algo tweak will now group conversations together and highlight some of the most interesting exchanges surrounding a given Tweet, right below that Tweet. To surface some of the most interesting conversations, Twitter will take factors into account like whether the original account has replied.
This however, isn;t the first time that when Twitter is bringing an algorithmic tweak to better its visual appearance. For a short recap, we had many algorithmic revamps to the timeline view of Twitter since last year. One of them was the ‘while you were away’ feature which shows the user a set of tweets he/she may find interesting but missed because they were not logged in.
Twitter also opened up more to provide better services like websites like Facebook. Another attempt at remodeling the experience of Twitter users was reducing abuse and violent threats on its platform, which was released this April. This tested a pre-emptive, anti-abuse filter that automatically identifies abusive tweets and limits their “reach”. This worked to some extent but no system is loophole free.
The latest tweak brings about a new algorithmic change to the conversation view of tweets.
This makes replying and surfacing tweets, finding relevant and most popular tweets surrounding a given subject, much easier for any user.
Twitter’s Product Manager Akarshan Kumar explains this new change in the blog as:
Conversations surrounding a Tweet, particularly if they’ve sparked lots of replies and disparate conversations, can be hard to follow. So, we’re doing a few things to make this much easier: grouping conversations together and highlighting some of the most interesting exchanges surrounding a given Tweet right below that Tweet. To surface some of the most interesting conversations, we’ll take factors into account like whether the original account has replied.
Another feature which comes along with this change, is the way conversation and related tweets are linked. Both will now be joined by a twitter-blue conversation line making it easier for the users to follow the cluster. The most popular, tweets which have got most responses, are pushed to the top and are high on visibility, while the tweets in the conversation having less or no replies are pushed lower. You can consider this similar to how Facebook has been sorting out comments these days, with ‘Top Comments’ showing up-top, while less popular ones drifting down.
Also, if you want to see replies to a specific Tweet within a conversation, you can click “View other replies”.
Kumar writes that Twitter will continually be iterating and improving on this experience to make it easier to understand and participate in conversations on Twitter as well as to find the best, most relevant content they have to offer.
