Sometimes a tweet can be very popular and start a retweet conversation at the same time, and Twitter is now experimenting with a way to more easily find those comments within a thread.
Twitter understandably likes to keep things simple, which is why we've only got three main options to react to a tweet with: Like, Retweet, and Comment. But opting to retweet unlocks two options, either just a plain retweet or a retweet with comment. As The Verge reports, Twitter is experimenting with highlighting retweets that include a comment.
Multiple users have confirmed via Twitter that their accounts now differentiate between retweets and retweets with comments by splitting them into two separate counts. This is clearly an experimental feature as users are seeing different implementations of the same feature. For example, @divacaroline sees a breakdown of retweets with and without comments just below the Retweets heading on Twitter, where as @mehedih_ has an extra line of text below the Likes and Retweets count which says "X Retweets with comments."
For the more popular tweets, it's sure to be a welcome feature allowing the comments to be more easily and quickly viewed in their own thread with the click of a button or tap of the screen. However, there's no guarantee Twitter will decide to roll it out as a standard feature of the service. Experiments happen all the time, but very few make it past the public testing phase.
Jane Manchun Wong, well known app reverse engineer, suggested Twitter was working on such a counter back on April 16. Internally, it looks as though the feature is being referred to as a "quote_count" and a way of easily viewing quoted tweets.
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