Twitter tests an easier way to find quote tweets

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Twitter is testing a new option that shows you all the times a post has been retweeted with a comment, the company has confirmed to The Verge. In screenshots posted by users with the feature enabled, a new “Retweet with comments” counter can be seen alongside the existing “Likes” and “Retweets” numbers. Twitter said it’s currently testing the feature with a small group of iOS Twitter users.

The feature won’t show you anything you can’t currently find using the service’s search function, it just makes it much easier. That’s important when some Twitter users use quote tweets to reply to a tweet, rather than using the service’s built-in reply functionality to neatly organize tweets into conversation threads. Currently, if you want to find quote tweets, you have to paste the tweet’s URL into the service’s search box.

It’s worth noting that Twitter has experimented with a few UI changes over the past year, but very few of them have actually turned into fully fledged features. There was its ‘original tweeter’ label that was meant to highlight who’d started a particular conversation thread, a snooze feature for notifications, and an option to get notifications for responses to an individual tweet. There’s every possibility that “Retweet with comments” could join them.