Twitter is exposing some concepts they are evaluating to improve the user experience. And to do so, they have focused on one feature of the platform: mentions. They are considering many options to make mentions a means to interact on the platform without becoming a burden or a harassment tool.
Twitter explores new options for “mentions”
Dominic Camozzi shared some concepts they are exploring at Twitter to give users control over the interaction generated on the platform and when to participate in the conversation.
While mentions are great for grabbing our attention, inviting us into a conversation, or giving us credit for some content, they can also backfire. Sometimes we are not interested in participating in a conversation or do not want to be mentioned in a certain context. And of course, mentions become a big problem when they are used by trolls or stalkers.
Unmention yourself
I want to make it easier to untag yourself from a Tweet or conversation you don't want to be involved in.
Just pick “Unmention yourself from this conversation” from the more info menu and the link to your profile will be removed. pic.twitter.com/nfHIyReE9f
— Dominic Camozzi (@_dcrc_) June 14, 2021
However, these situations could have some kind of solution soon, as Twitter is looking into the possibility of providing users with new options for these scenarios. For example, as seen in the images, there could be an option to “unmentioned this conversation”.
Simply selecting this option would remove the link to our profile. So if you don’t want to participate in that conversation, or you don’t find the context-appropriate, you could override it so that the tweet doesn’t link to your profile and you no longer receive any notifications about that thread.
Another concept they are exploring has to do with mentions by strangers. When this happens, Twitter could send a notification like the one shown in the first image. If you use that option, Twitter would understand that you do not want that situation to happen again, so it would not allow that user to mention you again in the future.
And one last alternative that Twitter has made available to the community is the possibility of having controls to specify who can mention us and even set periods to cancel mentions. For the moment, all these functions are just concepts that Twitter is exploring, so we will have to wait to see if they become new options to control interaction within the platform.
