Twitter will no longer prompt users to quote tweets

Twitter is bringing back retweets to how they were before saying that quote tweets didn't achieve what it was supposed to.

Twitter retweets are back to normal. (REUTERS)

Twitter is removing the quote tweet prompt it introduced in October. Retweets are going back to the way they were, Twitter announced. Twitter had introduced this quote tweet prompt in a bid to curb misinformation ahead of the US presidential election.

The reason behind Twitter introducing this was to encourage people to “consider why they are amplifying a Tweet.” Twitter also shared what it observed with the quote tweets prompt. “The use of Quote Tweets increased, but 45% of them included single-word affirmations and 70% had less than 25 characters,” Twitter said.

After learning from this product experience, we're sharing an update: today Retweet functionality will be returning to the way it was before.

Here's what we saw while we prompted Quote Tweets (1/4): https://t.co/MzoDKy3d69

— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) December 16, 2020

Twitter also highlighted that there was an overall 20% decrease in both retweets and quote tweets. The quote tweet prompt did “encourage” users to type something before retweeting it but you could leave it blank as well. Then the tweet is retweeted like it normally does. This renders the feature useless if no text is added along with the retweet. Users can still choose to quote tweets while retweeting them.

Along with quote tweets, Twitter also introduced another prompt of alerting users to read articles before retweeting them. Twitter is still keeping this feature saying that it “may be more effective than others.” The company also said that prompting users to read articles leads to more informed sharing.

Earlier this month, Twitter removed another experiment, threaded replies. This feature let users reply to specific replies in a tweet. Twitter said threaded replies made it harder to read and join conversations. Twitter also shut down its prototype app, twttr where it tests unreleased features.