Twitter says it is turning off threaded replies because they made conversations hard to read, and shuts down its prototype twttr app
It's also shutting down its experimental app, twttr — Twitter has been experimenting with threaded replies for some time as a way to potentially make replies easier to read and follow.
The VergeJay Peters
Context & Ripple Effects
This closes a two-year experiment arc. Twitter opened applications for its twttr beta program in early 2019 to rethink conversations — rounded, indented, color-coded replies with hidden engagement icons — then confirmed it was testing those threaded conversations on Twitter.com ahead of a wider rollout.
First-order effects
Users who received the May rollout of the indented, line-connected reply layout lose it, as Twitter concedes the threading made conversations harder rather than easier to read.
The twttr beta testers who signed up in 2019 lose their dedicated testbed app entirely, ending the channel through which Twitter validated conversation features before shipping them.
Second-order effects
Features still on the roadmap from this track — notably the conversation participants compose tool that lets users limit who can reply — now have to ship (or die) without the prototype app that de-risked them.
Twitter's product team absorbs the cost of a full rollback: engineering effort spent building and rolling out the indented reply layout gets unwound instead of iterated on.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, prototype apps become a publish-then-prune mechanism: platforms test radical conversational redesigns in public, keep only what survives contact with real usage, and treat reversals as normal product hygiene rather than failure.
Conversation design on major platforms trends toward conservative defaults — flat reply lists and moderation controls over visual restructuring — because readability failures at scale outweigh novelty gains.
The trend: Social platforms are running public prototype apps as disposable R&D labs for conversation design, keeping the moderation controls that survive and discarding the visual experiments that don't.
Some learnings: *the new look made convos harder to read & join - we're exploring other ways to make this easier. *you want more context about who you're talking to - we're working to add this. *you want more control - we're iterating on our convo settings.https://twitter.com/ ..…
Your feedback shapes Twitter. We asked and you let us know this reply layout wasn't it, as it was harder to read and join conversations. So we've turned off this format to work on other ways to improve conversations on Twitter. https://twitter.com/...
We appreciate the feedback you gave us through this run of our prototype app twttr. For now we're turning it off so we can work on new tests to improve the conversation experience on Twitter. If you're using twttr, switch to the main Twitter app to keep up with what's happening. …
For now, people using twttr will lose access to the app as we work on new conversations features. Updates to come as we explore what's next for twttr. Grateful to everyone who helped us test this. 🙏 https://twitter.com/...
We've also been asking you to give third-party Twitter clients full API access and to ban the nazis but you keep ignoring that feedback. 😒 https://twitter.com/...
I'm disappointed, yet also unsurprised. The twttr UI took some time to acclimate to it, but once I did so, I found it a much more efficient & engaging experience. However, I recognise it was probably too conceptually difficult for non-power users to grasp. https://twitter.com/...
Taking a moment to chuckle politely at the idea that Twitter spent two years redesigning conversations and discovered it had made them worse https://www.theverge.com/...