Twitter Changes @replies; Users Up In Arms
May 13th, 2009 (9:44am) Simon Mackie 14 CommentsTweet This (10)
Today’s Twitter controversy is the decision to remove @replies directed at users you don’t follow from your timeline. According to Twitter, “receiving one-sided fragments via replies sent to folks you don’t follow in your timeline is undesirable.” This move — which has caused quite an uproar among users — means that one of the most useful features of Twitter, namely the ability to discover interesting people from conversation fragments, has been torpedoed. Although you’re still able to see tweets mentioning other users you don’t follow (including retweets), direct replies don’t show up, so you won’t see conversations between people you follow and those you don’t.
Curiously, Twitter apparently used to offer the ability to remove “one-sided fragments” as an option in settings. Given the uproar following the change, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was reinstated, or that an option to restore the original way @replies were handled was added to Twitter’s settings page.
What do you think of the change to @replies?
Tags: twitter
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I think it’s an example of how Twitter really doesn’t “get” community. Twitter is alienating their community, but without the community Twitter would have nothing. They really need someone to help with community management.
The thought that “receiving one-sided fragments via replies sent to folks you don’t follow in your timeline is undesirable” flies in the face of one of the most powerful aspects of Twitter as you’ve mentioned: discovering new and interesting people because they’ve popped into your conversation stream even if you don’t actually know or follow them. Twitter doesn’t get community & it seems they also don’t get what avid (rabid) Twitter users like about Twitter.
Personally, I am hugely surprised they made such a huge change without testing it. Surely it couldn’t be that hard to test this?
And yep, they need to get some community smarts, stat!
While I’m in favor of the change (I’ve never found the one-sided conversations helpful) I don’t see why they can’t just leave it as an option for the users. Surely more options are better than fewer?
Aliza has followed up with a great post on customer power in the social media age.
Twitter has now changed its story, saying that the feature was changed for scalability reasons: http://mashable.com/2009/05/13/twitter-fixreplies/
I’d be interested in seeing if those who are most vocal against this change even used that verbose setting.
Personally, after a very brief attempt at trying to see all @replies, I found it created a tremendous amount of noise for me and quickly reverted back.
I think a lot of the initial uproar was based on misinformation and incorrect statements that were floating about. Some believed you wouldn’t see direct replies if another user was mentioned which is clearly not the case.
Honestly, I think that the uproar went viral so quickly that a lot of folks are protesting over something without even really realizing the implications or reality of the actual changes and if it even really affects them.
Obviously, if you made the conscious choice to use this feature then you have a legitimate grievance at lost functionality, but I’m guessing that the number of users that fall in to this category doesn’t match the number of users protesting.
SB
It is the wackiest, opt in/opt out mess up I’ve ever seen. It actually makes twitter less social. Your right and I do hope they add an opt in option where they had the opt out one.
NUTS!
Looks like Twitter, as someone already said, is not getting “community” and is going down the same route as so many other sites have done and this could lead to an exodus of users as it has on such places.
There are too many moderators about on so many places that think they have to get heavy-handed when one or two may complain about such messages from people that are not following them or such.
Oh dear!
@Scott – Agreed to an extent. This kind of user hysteria over changes to an online service (ref: this and facebook) is interesting, I think. The level of fear of change in online services is extremely high. Maybe users feel they have been burned too many times by other services, don’t want their favorite app to change?
I understand twitter experiences a lot of server issues, but this move takes away an effective way to meet new people that you don’t have in your stream.
Rather than removing the option, twitter could have let us know “Because of technical difficulties, we’ve disabled X feature until we address the issues. In the meantime, you can work around it by doing X.”
as a fairly new user of twitter not sure i’ll really miss this, to be honest. i do wish twitter had been more forthright and simply said that the @replies were causing technical issues as the reason that it was being disabled…if that is the reason instead of addressing it as an “undesirable” ability, since clearly a lot of users desire it.