How to remove someone from a Twitter reply thread
Click Reply > Then click the ‘Replying to’ link > Uncheck users
I had the hardest time figuring out how to remove someone from a Twitter reply thread.
In the old days… to reply to someone, you had to include their username in your tweet. This made it hard to reply to more than 1 person at a time, because pretty soon 70 of your 140 characters are being taken up with just Twitter usernames.
Twitter launched a new reply feature that made it so you could reply to more users without taking up characters. Sweet!
But they made it nearly impossible to figure out how to control who you are actually replying to. Not sweet…
I could not figure it out for the life of me. I literally googled it, and searched twitter for it. No 🎲. I ended up asking random people who mentioned it how they did it.
Until one fateful day…
Friends are Awesome.
The breakthrough happened when I replied to someone famous in Saas cirlces that I respect, aka Patrick McKenzie and a friend saw that, and replied to me, and another friend replied to him, but dropped the famous person off the reply to not annoy him. I asked my friend how he did it. And he finally showed me how to remove someone from a Twitter reply.
I still had to hunt a bit but I figured out what he meant. Victory. The power was mine. Here is a gif for your visual viewing pleasure.
UX Problem: Switcheroo
I think the hardest part is Twitter completely switches the UX on you. They use the same element for two wildly different functions. Usually in Twitter, the ‘Replying to username username is a collection of links to the various usernames. Clicking on one of those links takes you completely away from tweet to the user profile page.
But then they take that same link placement, and phrase, and make it something completely different. Now clicking on it opens a modal and allows you to remove users from the reply. 2 wildly different actions. The same element. Super confusing @Twitter.
I’m on Twitter Joshua Dance, come say hi.
