Sarah Perez, TechCrunch:

Twitter today is beginning its test of a radical and controversial change to its service with the launch of a new “Hide Replies” feature. Effectively, this option gives users the ability to wrestle back control over a conversation they’ve started by hiding any replies they feel aren’t worthy contributions — for example, replies that are irrelevant or outright offensive.

Hide Reply is right below the Mute this conversation button, accessed by tapping the “down arrow” menu to the upper right of a reply. Currently, the feature has only been released in Canada.

What does Hide Reply do?

Of course, users can choose for themselves to either Mute or Block people like this, which limits their ability to affect their own personal experience on Twitter. But this doesn’t remove their comments from others’ view. The “Hide Replies” feature, however, will.

But it’s not the equivalent of a delete button. In other words, hidden replies are not removed from Twitter entirely, they are just placed behind an icon. If people want to see the hidden replies, they can press this icon to view them.

It’ll be interesting to see how people use this feature, if they do at all. On the surface, seems like it might be a troll-trimming tool, to eliminate obnoxious replies that degrade a conversation.

Sarah says:

For example, a user could choose to hide replies that simply (and even politely!) disagreed with their view. This would then create a “filter bubble” where only people who shared the original poster’s same opinion would have their comments prominently displayed.

I can see this happening, especially in charged political threads. I can also see a suite of sophisticated editing tools emerging that “clean up” your thread by removing all those troublesome replies from the other side of your political stance.