After testing the feature in Canada, Twitter is now letting users in the U.S. and Japan hide replies to their tweets.

As someone who suffers from a surplus of inane responses to my tweets, I can state definitively that this is the single greatest thing I’ve ever seen.

“Twitter replies moderation lets you hide replies under your tweets, while providing an option to show the hidden replies,” Twitter’s Michelle Yasmeen Haq explained when the feature first went live. “We often hear from heavy Tweeters that they want to be able to protect their conversations. People who start interesting conversations on Twitter are really important to us, and we want to empower them to make the conversations they start as healthy as possible by giving them some control … We already see people trying keep their conversations healthy by using block, mute, and report, but these tools don’t always address the issue. Block and mute only change the experience of the blocker, and report only works for the content that violates our policies.”

Exactly right.

Amazingly, this feature is controversial in some circles, presumably in those circles that are used to being able to shout down others by hijacking someone else’s conversation. But as Twitter notes, this feature has been used mostly to hide replies that they think are irrelevant, abusive or unintelligible. Which is exactly how it should be used.

I intend to wield this power liberally.

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