Twitter is great for firing off a single thought. Few of us, however, have a single thought, and so “thread” their tweets, that is, reply to their original tweet with more tweets. It’s far from a perfect system, in part because it sort of breaks the intent of Twitter. That said, Twitter, which has absolutely no other pressing issues on its site at the moment, has decided to cater to tweetstormers with a new update.
The tool is simple: Make a tweet, preferably a good one, and then add other tweets underneath it with the “plus” button. Once you’re done, hit “Tweet all” and you can dump your entire thread on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/Twitter/status/940644608089788418
This tool will likely have a fairly notorious set of takers, and not everyone was enthused:
https://twitter.com/jordansdiamonds/status/940646646001659904
— pourmecoffee (@pourmecoffee) December 12, 2017
— Ryan (@alwaysonoffense) December 12, 2017
On a slightly more polite level, this will be a useful feature for some users, but it also does open the door to giant piles of harassment, and not just by the service’s notorious racists with inexplicable anime avatars. Imagine some teen composing a twenty-tweet long thread about how much they hate somebody and dumping it on the internet. Heck, imagine somebody just filling tweets with garbage and clogging your mentions. Twitter’s notorious problems handling abuse may pop up yet again with this new function. But hey, at least some excessively tiresome know-it-alls are happy.