Months after changing how replies work on its platform, Twitter could soon be introducing another major change to replies. The company is testing a new threaded replies system for its social network, in hopes to make the platform feel “more conversational.”

At this point in time, threaded replies on Twitter are at a really early stage. The company’s director of product management, Sara Haider, tweeted out screenshots of what seems to be a very early stage of the feature. The UI of the feature works just like you’d expect: replies to a tweet are organized under the parent tweet, nested all along to make replies easier to navigate. The purpose of the feature here is to make the platform feel more conversational, though being able to collapse reply threads could make reading discussions on the platform incredibly easy and quick, much like Reddit.

Another interesting feature Twitter is toying with is online indicators. When enabled, your followers and others on Twitter will see a green circle over your profile picture on their feed and your profile, indicating that you are online and “looking for conversation.” This is one of those features where you’d probably want to turn it off right away unless you want random people knowing whenever you are on the Twitter app.

As for threaded replies, it’s a bit complicated. Threaded replies on Twitter are obviously going to be an interesting addition if Twitter does end up making it official. Unlike Reddit, however, Twitter is quite dense in terms of content — replies can have embedded quotes, images, videos, cards, and so much more. Fitting all of this under a nested UI could make things cluttered really quickly, so Twitter needs to be really smart about the design here.

Tagged with Reddit, Twitter