I’m furious. Absolutely astounded and ready to scream. Why? Because Twitter just announced a drastic change to their service that will forever affect how people interact with the stream. They have effectively removed all discoverability of new people to follow and connect with, thereby destroying the very element that made Twitter the powerful networking tool it has been for so many hundreds of thousands of people, myself included.
So what happened? Well today Twitter announced that due to some “confusions” they decided to completely the remove the @ reply settings and instead stick you with the very limiting default without any option to change it.
Previously Twitter settings looked like this:
By default for all users, the Replies setting was set to “Show me @ replies to the people I’m following,” meaning that any tweet prefaced with the username of someone you weren’t following would not appear in your stream. Some prefer this setting as a means to reduce the number of tweets in their stream, allowing them to only follow the conversations for which they follow both people involved. Makes sense that it’s an option, but it was never the one I had enabled.
Instead, when I first became a Twitter user almost a year and a half ago, I had selected the “Show all @ replies” setting, allowing me to discover new people whom the people I follow interact with. This is specifically how I’ve been able to grow my network to such an extent over a relatively short period of time. By learning who influences my influencers, I’ve been able to seek out more people who can have an influence on me — make new connections, learn things I might never have learned, discover crossover relationships I was never aware of.
The new design:
Now Twitter has decided to completely remove the @ replies setting and permanently filter out from the stream any @ replies to people you don’t follow. I think it’s asinine, and so do a lot of people I follow. Interestingly, you’ll also see that people are unaware of the change because they always had the default setting selected. Perhaps what Twitter really needed to do was to better educate users on the settings, NOT remove them entirely.
People’s reactions:
No, Twitter, this was NOT a “small” settings update. This was a major failure to understand a deep, longstanding value of your service. Start paying attention.
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wow. thanks for pointing this out whitney. this is a horrible idea. i did the same thing you did with your setting when i first signed up because i wanted to find more interesting people to follow and it worked out great. by taking away this option, it will change the experience for everyone, esp. new users just getting started.
Epic social network fail: Taking away user control _and_ a valued feature with no user input before-the-fact tanks the sense of trust we've developed with twitter as a partner in our work and social space.
I think Twitter doesn't think.
Thanks, Whitney, for pointing this out and leading the charge. Hopefully they will listen to their people.
People often misspell my twitter name — they use wendywooHOo instead of wendywooWHo; with the change, I don't see the comments unless I search for the incorrect name. Annoying.
Twitters UX was always kind of “meh”, but it has been cope-able since I began using it a couple of years ago. I thought they hired a UX person. If so, they need to rethink either who they hired or what their users want. The problem with Twitter is it has become too big for it's own good. The data is so rich now that the simple interface and data filtering points aren't cutting it anymore. Hashtags are a move in the right direction, but with all of the data out there to be had on Twitter, users need better filtering, and by just getting rid of a setting, they have only hindered their growth. Is this a quick test to see reaction? Not really an A/B test, but a “switch it off, gauge reaction and flip it back on?”
And as Wendy pointed out, people take my Twitter name and not only misspell it, but do it on purpose. I'm @periodicdesign, but people will use @periodicmoviegoer or @periodictraveler. When people ask, “why didn't you respond to my tweet?,” I say, “What tweet?!” I don't call them by a different name, I use their name. If your name is John, I don't call you Bob.
This was obviously a very poorly considered decision. Extensively considered? Maybe. But intelligently so? No.
Particularly sad for me, since a few months ago I suggested what I humbly believed to be an enhancement to this setting – allowing users granular control over which users they receive @messages from – only to hear from Alex that the suggestion was a feature best left for development by the 3rd party app community. This makes all sorts of faulty user assumptions, and the underlying lack of insight has now manifested in this new @messages change.
Twitter guys: It's a terrible change. And in general, you're misunderstanding and devaluing one of Twitter's key draws (that it is usable via multiple entry points, from SMS to various API consumer apps, to the twitter.com website itself) by pushing feature development responsibilities out to app development communities.
Completely agree. Twitter removed an option because they didn't want to rewrite poor documentation. I'm sure most of you knew what the options meant, but if you look at them from a new users perspective it is a little confusing. Twitter just needed better documentation and instead of sitting down to do the work they just deleted the option all together.
This one is so obvious, I feel I can't add anything to all the wonderful comments you have received so I will say this:
Clearly this is a MONSTER topic on Twitter (see #fixreplies) so let's turn it into an experiment on how effective Twitter can be as a force of change (or perhaps how bullheaded @ev and @biz can be in their new celebrity)
Who wants to make odds on when it gets fixed?
On a side note: (not data supported) I would think that (for now) the majority of Twitter traffic emanates from the US. So why on earth would Twitter take down the service at noon pacific time for 1 hr as opposed to, say 3am?
I agree Whitney, not sure why the heck they would remove a feature that facilitates discovery.
Twitter, please restore this feature.
Twitter says they have removed this behavior because it is “not desirable”. Users can decide if they desire it or not by turning it off if they don't like it. Please, listen to your users. It is clearly desirable.
thanks, whitney – excellent post on an epic twitter #fail – like you, i use the @ replies to add new users to my stream and see how and why others are interacting with people i follow. this change makes absolutely no sense, and i hope that @ev, @biz and everyone else @ twitter get the memo and restore the original functionality.
mike pratt: over under is five business days.
It's definitely a desirable feature. But let's just say this — there are alternatives like identi.ca (run by Evan Prodromou of Wikitravel), itself based on the open-source Laconica. If the Twitter peeps don't restore the proper behaviour, at least as an 'expert user' setting, why don't we all just move en masse?
Twitters removal of open @replies is tantamount to a complete lack of faith AND a complete misunderstanding of their users. Get a clue @ev @biz.
I hate it! It's completely removed the social aspect of Twitter. A significant number of the people I am following, I found because I could see other people's @replies. Plus, most of the people I interact with post more replies than updates, so I'm only seeing a fraction of their tweets, which makes Twitter very boring.
ok, I'm going to be cynical here (forget usage patterns, blah blah blah)
Cutting out the @all at replies option will reduce twitters server load significantly!
Now I am not familiar with the Twitter database structure but I know that cutting an option like the @all reply will significantly reduce the calls the servers need to make per tweet per second. From now on the servers don't have to cross check users account to see if they have this option selected. This would have been painful for the server load before, because regardless as to whether you had changed this option or not, the server scripts would still have to have checked it.
With users on the increase and money coming in at a minimum as CEO I would certainly be looking for ways to keep the service up an running without buying another tower block of servers?
Sorry for getting a lit bit geeky. Anyway, I'm sure providing the best service comes way before profit and loss margins. I mean who would have thought a company trying to make money would have any ulterior motives!? ;0)
That's insane!!!
It's perhaps the dumbest thing Twitter's done.
I'm wondering now: does @Twitter actually understand Twitter? Does the team “get” Twitter. Hard to believe; kinda ironic if true.
If I were one of the VCs who invested in Twitter, I'd be holding a sit-down with the team.
@spidermint that is exactly what I was thinking. Most likely the feature is “undesirable” from a technical standpoint and is simply being concealed as undesirable from a user feature standpoint. The alternative to cross checking would be to make all accounts receive all @ replies all the time, and perhaps leave it to clients like TweetDeck to filter locally if the user chooses. The problem with this is, given that the default option was to not view @ replies to people you don't follow, switching to “all @ replies all the time” might be a huge server-side burden in and of itself.
Saying that this was a bad idea would be a gross understatement. Twitter has severely reduced the effectiveness of their service by removing this feature.
Not to pimp my own Twitter feed, but apparently the chances of you ever seeing this tweet are now severely diminished:
“If I wanted to only talk to people I already knew, I wouldn't need @Twitter in the first place. #fixreplies”
http://twitter.com/jayfanelli/status/1784446028
What about:
Funniest thing from @orian: he values my advice!
vs.
@orian just told me the funniest thing…
Also has the virtue of being shorter, leaving more chars for the content.
Nothing new to add, but you have my support! that was a great way to meet new people!
Being able to see who my friends are talking to is the key to how I have developed such an incredible base of people who all add a great deal of worth to both my Twitter stream and to my life. This is an important feature. Please bring it back.
This is the dumbest thing. Ever. All your friends were strangers at one point – and to exclude strangers from meeting and connecting in the first place (just because they don't follow each other) it defeats everything that makes Twitter (and relationships) work.
This change was the first time I realized that this had an option, but it is something I had been wishing for for some time. Now that I know I used to have the option, I want it back.
Dear Twitter, if an option is confusing, the solution is to redesign the interaction or explain the option better. Yanking it is not the answer.
As it turns out, it *was* an engineering problem concealed as a UX problem. That's pretty lame but not surprising. @Spidermint and I were right on the mark:
http://blog.twitter.com/2009/05/whoa-feedback.html
http://blog.twitter.com/2009/05/we-learned-lot….
If Twitter and #fixreplies is about confusion, it’s a design error. « synset & skrevet & laget // May 13, 2009 at 5:00 pm
[...] I first discovered the changes at Pleasure & Plain, who explains the changes very well. [...]
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Nice post. Thanks for sharing, Victoria. What a great way to use this new feature!
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