As a Twitter user, you would know that you can’t add text to your retweets. This has changed now.
Many users have been yearning for this feature, however, Twitter faced some problems with visual clutter which is why we didn’t get this update sooner, but hey! The update is rolling out now.
The update has been rolled out for iOS, Android, and mobile.twitter.com as well. Apart from adding a GIF to the retweet, users can also add up to 4 pictures and a video. Some of the famous Twitter accounts including @NASA and @gameofthrones have started using the features that come with the new update.
This small update, no matter how simple it looks, took Twitter some time to figure out.
The social network shared some information related to the hard work that went into this update and said,
Teamwork and collaboration are a huge part of Twitter’s engineering culture. A project like this brought together and saw contributions from multiple teams across Twitter Eng.
Initial Problems
Adding GIFs or any media to retweets initially caused visual clutter. Moreover, the tweet that was being shared lost visibility as well. Instead of the text, only a link to the text was shown. Something like this:
So, unless the user clicked on the link, nobody knew what was happening. With this update, this issue has been dealt with.
The main problem was legibility, Twitter faced an issue in understanding and differentiating between the original tweet and the retweet at the back end.
Twitter says,
To improve comprehension, we focused on creating hierarchy, prioritizing the author’s voice, and providing more context around the tweet being retweeted.
More updates will be rolled out soon to make the whole process more interactive.
