Twitter has had a difficult history with videos. It used to own a short-form video service called Vine which allowed people to upload six-second-long, looping video clips. Vine launched in June 2012 and Twitter acquired it in a hot minute less than six months later. Twitter killed Vine in 2016, the same year an obscure video app called TikTok launched.

Now Twitter is back in the video business. The company hopes to take on a dominant TikTok with a feature that enables users to quote and react to tweets with video. Here's how it works.

Now You Can Quote Tweet With Reaction

Twitter has added a new feature to the retweet menu called Quote Tweet with reaction. This is a button that takes you to a page where you can take a photo or video, or select one from your phone archive. This video or photo is then added below your reaction tweet.

A product lead at Twitter sampled the feature, which Twitter is calling "Tweet Takes", to let users see how it works and what it looks like:

Only Available on iOS for Now

Twitter is currently testing this feature, which is only available to a small group of iOS users for now. The company will rely on user feedback before rolling it out more widely.

Related: How to Set Up a Professional Twitter Account

Twitter has been on an experimental binge of late, trying out new features and either keeping them or killing them if they don't gain traction. This is a departure from its tradition of resisting change.

Tweet Takes will come with their own challenges. For one, it is not easy to scan videos to flag abuse, unlike with text. And with Twitter often being an arena for combat, Tweet Takes could escalate online vitriol.

Hopefully, this will not be the case and everyone will play nice. For the time being, it is not possible to control who can and cannot use this feature on your tweets.