Twitter Wants Users To Tweet More Often, Here's How

JAKARTA - As part of its plan to get people to tweet more often, Twitter is working on a plethora of features the company believes will help reassure users about their privacy.

These new features will be an extension of Twitter's ongoing efforts to offer users more granular control over what they can and cannot do with their content on the platform.

Although Twitter continues to roll out new features, some of its latest moves have not proven to be very popular with users. One of the most notable flops of recent times has been Fleets, the instant messaging feature that is a shameless rip-off of Snapchat Stories.

The feature debuted in November 2020 but was discontinued last month due to low usage. Twitter is also testing a 'Dislike' button, but it's still unclear if the feature will eventually appear.

The upcoming feature will tackle what Twitter calls 'social privacy', which deals with how users can keep their activity on the platform private. That's according to Svetlana Pimkina, research staff at Twitter, who told Bloomberg that being unsure of their privacy status is one of the main reasons why many users are withdrawing from the platform at all or not engaging as much as they would like.

As part of the plan, Twitter will soon begin urging people to check whether their accounts are public or private. Starting this month, the company will begin asking users to review the security of their accounts, including the privacy of their Tweets and other personal information.

Going forward, the privacy push will increase in scope and scale, with the company slated to begin testing several new features, including the ability to archive Tweets, delete followers, hide 'liked' Tweets, and leave conversations.

These tools will help users secure a wide range of information, including their Tweets, posts they like, lists of their followers, and more. One of the major changes in this work is the ability to remove unwanted followers, which has long been a request from users complaining about the increasing toxicity and lack of civic discourse on the platform.

As part of the solution, Twitter has allowed users to decide who can reply to their Tweets. Going forward, users will be able to easily remove followers they don't want. While users can already block someone, this new feature will allow them to remove the person from their follower list once and for all.

Another important upcoming feature is the ability to archive Tweets, where users can hide old Tweets after a certain amount of time. Such tweets will be visible to the account holder, but not to others.

As per reports, Twitter may let users hide their Tweets after 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, or 1 year. Apparently, the feature is still in the "concept stage", so there is no ETA yet.

Along with the two highlight features mentioned above, users may also get the ability to hide 'liked' Tweets. This will allow users to set who can and who can't see which Tweets they like.

Lastly, users can also get the option to remove themselves from public conversations on the platform. Twitter looks set to start testing this feature before the end of this year.

These will all add up to features like Super Follows, which launched earlier this week to help users monetize their Tweets.

While the various upcoming changes all sound positive in theory, it's still unclear whether these privacy changes will be enough to get people to tweet more often, or to bring back users who have long left Twitter for one reason or another.