Last year, Twitter talked about future plans to implement features that would help build interaction on the platform and would "increase the health of public conversation," according to CEO Jack Dorsey. Now, they're rolling out the first of these.
At CES, Twitter representatives told Engadget that new features will begin rolling out to some users for testing in the coming weeks. One of these is a sort of status indicator like what we've seen in Facebook's website chat tool. The idea is probably to make it easier to start a conversation with people, knowing you'll get an immediate response
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The other new feature is call "ice breakers". These are more like prewritten messages people can modify and use to initiate conversation with strangers. According to reporting by The Verge last year, it should look something like this.
Apparently Twitter is also considering allowing people to pin this sort of ice breaker to the top of their profile, so new followers can use it to start up a conversation with a familiar topic instead of floundering.
At the very least, the company seems to be trying to make its social media platform a little less intimidating. And who knows, maybe fostering better conversations could go a long way towards curbing its problems with toxicity and harassment.