Update March 29th, 12:06PM ET: Twitter has changed replies back to the way they used to work — well, as of this writing, only the web. Hopefully they’re changed back on iOS soon, too. Our original story follows.
Tweet replies no longer show who users are replying to
This definitely won’t make Twitter even more confusing.
This definitely won’t make Twitter even more confusing.
Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge
is a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.
Twitter’s latest baffling change makes replies a lot more difficult to sift through. Now, when you’re looking at replies, tweets don’t actually show who the user is replying to, making them look like a confusing string of out-of-context missives.
The change muddies up the ever-worsening Twitter experience in a bunch of small ways. If you click on a tweet with replies, you’ll see those listed under the tweet as you used to, but they don’t have as obvious of a connection to the parent tweet. Replies to your tweets will still show up in your Notifications tab, but they just look like random tweets that might not be there intentionally.
Basically, as my colleague Tristan Cooper put it, “I love how every reply now looks like a vague subtweet on the timeline.”
Interestingly, you may have noticed that the above tweet embed shows that Cooper is replying to me. I’m also seeing reply information on TweetDeck. And sometimes, on Twitter.com, I can see a gray line connected to replies on one of my own tweets.
Perhaps that all means this change is just a bug. But given the general product messiness and cost cutting at Elon Musk’s Twitter, I’m not holding my breath. We pinged Twitter for comment, but its press email auto-replied with a poop emoji.
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