Only a month after rolling out the feature, Twitter has quietly removed the ability for users to receive direct messages from any follower. For now, the person you want to DM will need to follow you back before you share any private thoughts.

Last month, Twitter added a simple checkbox in settings that allowed users to opt in for indiscriminate follower DMs. That's gone now. It's currently unclear how successful the feature was after its release and why the functionality is now shuttered — The Next Web reports that Twitter is currently directing journalists pressing for more information to an earlier blog post that expresses the company's willingness to experiment with its features. However, since the site has tried in recent months to improve the clunky DM UI, more experiments are likely on the way.

Update: The Verge has learned that some users still have the feature, but it's disabled for others, which jibes with Twitter's "experiment" verbiage.