Just because you’re at the bar, doesn’t mean you want to speak to every person in the bar. That’s basically what Twitter’s on about these days. Now, Twitter has officially rolled out a new feature that will help users dictate who can reply to their tweets and who cannot.

According to Twitter, the reply limiting feature was developed to increase the amount of “meaningful conversations” that take place on the platform, and to help people limit abuse and spam in their replies. In the greater scheme of things, it makes sense. People will have the option to only broadcast a message that won’t allow anyone to comment, but people will still be able to retweet with comment, for example.

The feature was tested in beta a while ago, after which Twitter accidentally send out the patch notes in an iOS update last week, even though the feature wasn’t available yet. Now it’s pushing out the feature for reals, and anyone on iOS or Android can access it. The feature is also available on desktop Twitter, but it’s not in Tweetdeck yet.

A small globe icon will, from now forth, appear at the bottom of your tweet. If you do nothing, everyone will still be able to reply (this is the default option). If you tap the globe icon, you’ll have the choice to limit replies just to those who follow you, or just to those who you tag in the tweet itself.

The third option is to tag no-one, which will produce the broadcast method we mentioned earlier. We need to note that people will still be able to retweet with comment in each instance.

Source: The Verge