Claire McNear, How Quote Tweets Helped Ruin Twitter:
When did things get so bad on Twitter? It’s hard to say, even as nostalgia for the network’s simpler, friendlier days permeates the site. Was it the runup to the 2016 election? The inevitable growth beyond the insidery club of Twitter’s earliest days? The mainstreaming of meme and troll culture? In reality, the shift in discourse from freewheeling internet lab to Room Where Everyone Screams At Everyone owes itself to many things: from the things above to the worldwide SAD plague and rickets hastened by a planet of laptop dens. But quote tweets—a nice, little feature on a nice, little site meant for us to do nice, little things—have had an outsize role in the nastiness….
The result is that the ugliest things on Twitter are frequently amplified. Unlike instances of ratio-ing, quote tweets beam the ugliness straight into followers’ feeds. The problem is especially insidious with Twitter’s true merchants of hate, who capitalize on just such a reaction: What more could an aspiring alt-right toad with 1,000 followers hope for than to be huffily fired into thousands upon thousands of additional feeds?
One of the ways I’ve tried to make Twitter more manageable and less frustrating is by disabling most people’s retweets. But there’s no way, on Twitter.com or on any client I know of, to disable quote-tweets. So when people want not just to spread the bad word but comment on it, to explain why it’s bad or to mock the person who originally tweeted it — and this is far more common that simply retweeting objectionable material — there’s no way for me to avoid that.
Tweetbot for iOS has a filter for quote tweets.
Cool! I didn’t know that was one of the options.