The day context came back to Twitter

And even if Twitter navigates those issues successfully, it’s still unclear how its groups product will fare against some fairly robust competition. Facebook Groups, Reddit, especially Discord have been thriving lately, and the latter two have been built from the ground up to promote the kind of group discussions that Twitter is only now getting ar... See more

Of course, groups have their downsides. Facebook’s groups product has regularly come in for criticism for hosting extremism and misinformation, particularly related to vaccines. The same thing that can make groups fun to use — the posts are less visible to outsiders, and can therefore build a sense of shared purpose — also makes them harder to poli... See more

In his thread about the test, Twitter product chief Kayvon Beykpour said he hopes Communities will make people feel more comfortable tweeting. “Tweets you post in Communities are ‘narrow-casted’ to only the people in that Community,” he said. “They're still public tweets, but they aren't amplified to all of your followers and they don't show up on ... See more

But what if you could build a version of Twitter that kept out the Reply Guys and the sea lions, and included only people who had some shared context around a subject or interest? That’s the idea between the company’s launch today of Communities, a way to create semi-public groups where only members can participate in conversations.

Whether you say the right thing or the wrong thing, it will inevitably get misconstrued by someone, and suddenly you’ve wasted an afternoon explaining yourself to people seemingly determined to misunderstand you.