Twitter is testing out some new language on tweet metrics by introducing “Quote” tweet count. As reported by The Verge, this was previously known as comments and retweets but from now on will be seen as “Quotes”.
Twitter appears to be making some interesting moves in recent weeks and months. Some of which like finally introducing a dedicated chat box for its web various, have been a long time coming.
However, rumours that the company is setting up some sort of a subscription platform are more out of left field and will be interesting to if they develop any further.
Twitter test “Quote” tweet count
The company recently made retweets with comments more visible when users tap to see retweets. However, Twitter introducing the “Quote” tweet count is designed to make it even more visible and accessible.
The company says it is trialling this new language metric to see if it works better than the previous system. This will be available to everyone as the company wants to see makes the metric “easier to access and more understandable.”
To be clear the number of “Quotes” a tweet gets is the number of times a tweet was retweeted with a comment. Below is what it now looks like.
Twitter replaces retweets with comments metric
It was back in May that Twitter introduced the retweets with comments metric. This came to some iOS users and displayed next to the retweets and likes counter much like the quotes metric is now.
The original innovation made it much easier to find retweets with a reply. This, in turn, made it easier for many to interact with conversations on the platform.
This is not the first time Twitter has introduced new features that have not become permanent. The company tried the ‘original tweeter’ label which informed people who started a conversation.
The platform has also seen a snooze feature for notifications as well as an option to get notifications for replies to a single tweet. As mentioned, these never became permanent features so this new feature may also fall by the wayside.
However, Twitter mentioned in January that it wanted to refine its UI to improve conversations. The company held concerns about getting ‘ratio’d’ and ‘dunking’ on tweets so wanted to improve this.
Given the nature of this new feature, it is likely it will stay around in one form or another. We may not see the exact language of ‘quote’ counts forever. However, this retweets with comments metric does look like it is here to stay