Facebook is adding quoted replies to Messenger conversations

Facebook is updating Messenger today with a new feature: the ability to quote and reply to specific messages in a conversation, making it easier to keep track of things (especially in larger group chats), as reported by VentureBeat.

The feature comes as an expansion of the company’s existing reaction emoji. Now, when you hold down on an individual message, in addition to simply adding a reaction, you’ll be able to reply with a new “reply” button, which will attach a quoted version of the original message to your response. The quoted messages aren’t quite their own message threads — they’ll still appear in line with the rest of the chat, but it seems useful enough.

It’s a pretty straightforward feature that fellow Facebook-owned messaging app WhatsApp has already offered for a while, so it makes sense that Facebook would bring it to Messenger. The move also harkens to the company’s overarching ambition to create a cross-platform system that would unite Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram messaging — achieving comparable features on all three platforms would no doubt make that eventual merging easier when it does come around.