Coming back to my thoughts on author-moderated replies, a feature which looks to be coming soon to Twitter, I want to loop in this thread by Derek Powazek, whose seminal Design for Community made me think a lot back in the day.
In effect, I am arguing that for author-moderated replies to work, Powazek’s “cone of silence” must be implemented in a way that offers Twitter users not just the ability to remove manually individual replies but to set default rules for replies to any of their tweets, automatically. Otherwise the cone requires too much ongoing maintenance to expect an individual Twitter user to deal with over time.
For any given Twitter user to be able to manage their own community of conversation on the site, they need access to “cone of silence” automation not just manual tools they’ll need to keep on top of on a daily or even hourly basis.