Twitter has announced that it is discontinuing the ‘quote tweet’ feature that prompts you to add a caption before retweeting a tweet. The announcement comes just after the company announced last week that it was also discontinuing the new reply function.
The ‘quote tweet’ feature was introduced in October as way of encouraging users to tweet and amplify information more thoughtfully.
“We don’t believe that this happened, in practice,” Twitter said in a series of tweets.
Read: Twitter to Label Confusing or Misleading Tweets
“The use of Quote Tweets increased, but 45 percent of them included single-word affirmations and 70 percent had less than 25 characters.” Twitter also said that the feature resulted in a 20 percent decrease in retweets and quote tweets while the automatic quote tweet prompt was in place.
Users have always been able to retweet tweets without any comment or caption of their own. Although the option was there, leaving the space blank and hitting retweet would share the tweet to your followers.
The quote tweet feature did not accomplish what Twitter wanted, and so they are reverting to the old way.
As it seems, Twitter might just stay as it is, considering the changes that are made and rescinded.
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