Twitter keeps making it easier to thread tweets for some reason

Once upon a time, Twitter’s whole thing was that people were supposed to keep their messages short and to the point. The site’s newest update seemingly goes against that philosophy.

On Wednesday, Twitter rolled out a tiny little feature that will make it easier for you to thread your tweets together. Tweet threading is a feature that’s been around for several years, but now you can choose to add a new tweet you’re drafting to an existing thread right from the text box. Twitter posted a helpful GIF to explain how it works.

From a UX standpoint, this is smart. For years, those of us who don’t know how to be concise had to thread our tweets together by writing each new entry as a reply to the previous tweet. Twitter eventually started letting people pre-draft threads to publish all at once. But if you’re not interested in thinking ahead by more than a few seconds, this newest feature will let you string your thoughts together with a little less effort.

From the standpoint of someone who already spends too much time on Twitter and would prefer to melt my brain a little less every day, this just adds a few degrees to the thermometer. 

It’s fine for Twitter to support threading, especially as the site makes threads a little easier to read and, potentially, ignore. But making it easier to create threads only encourages people to be more verbose on a site that was originally designed with efficiency in mind.