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Twitter replies make sense again — on the web, at least

Twitter replies make sense again — on the web, at least

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Tweet replies now once again show who the user is actually replying to.

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Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge

Twitter replies are back to normal — well, on the web. Earlier this week, tweet replies stopped showing who the user was actually replying to, which made them look like vague subtweets or random missives with no context. But on Wednesday morning, tweets once again included details about who is replying to whom on the web.

It’s unclear if the original shift was a bug or an intentional change. When we asked Twitter to clarify, its press email auto-replied with a poop emoji. Personally, I think it was just a bug given that tweet embeds and tweets on TweetDeck still showed reply information even when tweets on Twitter.com did not. Unfortunately, on iOS, replies still don’t show who people are replying to, but fingers crossed that changes soon.

If this is just a bug, it’s just one of many recent technical problems Twitter has suffered as of late. Some problems that messed up links and pictures earlier this month were caused by a single engineer. On February 8th, some issues prevented people from tweeting. And just after Christmas, the site experienced a few hours of glitchiness. Remaining employees have had to adjust to multiple layoffs and CEO Elon Musk’s many cost-saving measures, so perhaps this replies bug is just one of many spots of weirdness resulting from all of that.