Twitter Now Officially Allows Retweets With Comments & Ditches Discovery

This article originally appeared on 60 Second Social.

One of the more common problems that people experience when they try to comment on something they retweet is that you only get 140 characters to do it. More often than not you have to modify the original tweet you are commenting on, but Twitter wants to help improve the experience of commenting on a retweet.

Twitter is now allowing users to add a comment to the original retweet without restricting the whole lot to 140 characters at a time. Now you can add your remarks before hitting the retweet button.

Twitter has also been testing out some tweaks to make the retweets more visually appealing and in general easier for people (especially newer Twitter users) to read. Now quoted tweets will appear similar in style to a photo preview on your timeline.

Of course, as always not everyone is happy with the new retweet layout and style and there have been mixed reactions both positive and negative towards it. Personally, I think it is a big improvement on before allowing for greater flexibility when commenting on something you are retweeting. It is also easier to see on my timeline and easier to read as well.

It is unclear if the new retweet features will stay, Twitter has been known to try out and experiment publicly with new features and tools and then drop them without warning.

Elsewhere, Twitter is ditching the Discover tab on their mobile app and building new features around search. In a post on their blog, Twitter mentions how they are introducing ‘Trends’ in the place of Discovery. Trends will be an easier way of discovering what people are actually talking about on Twitter and there will be a description below each trend so that you know what they mean and what people are talking about.

Trends are being integrated directly into the search page on the mobile apps and Discovery is being retired for good on both Android and iOS. At the moment, trends are rolling out to U.S. users, if you try to access them from elsewhere in the world you will just see a list of trending hashtags however the fill trends feature is expected to roll out to more countries soon according to the official Twitter blog.

It is a smart move and makes more sense to integrate with search, personally, the Discovery tab was always something that was pretty much left neglected and I didn’t really flick over to it all that much as it didn’t add a huge amount to the Twitter experience.

About The Author

Mark is the founder of 60 Second Social media where he provides social media news and digital marketing analysis. You can follow him on Twitter here. You can also follow 60 Second Social on Twitter here. Or you can drop Mark an email at, [email protected]