Why Twitter is Wrong about @replies

Recently Twitter made an announcement that they were changing the way our tweetstreams worked. They say it’s because the old way was too confusing. It wasn’t all that confusing to me, or to anyone with half a brain and an attention span surpassing that of a 6 week old puppy.

Here’s what happened:

When you sign up for twitter you are (or, you WERE) given an option with regard to reading the messages of the people you chose to follow. You could either:

• read everything they wrote (including messages to people you don’t follow)
• read only the messages they send to the general public and those directed specifically to you (called @replies in twitter-speak.)

The first option works like this: I follow  my friend “Joe” but I don’t follow “Jane.” because I don’t know her. Joe says to Jane “@Jane hey what’s going on tonight? Did you want to go see this show? <insert link to show>.” I can see this message, and I realize that Jane’s a big fan of my favorite band. I can reply to Joe that I am already going to that show, and I will meet him there, and I can check out Jane’s tweet and maybe choose to follow Jane too, since we seem to have something in common. Connections formed. Social networking just happened. Hooray.

The second option means that I would have never seen the conversation at all and may have skipped the show because no one I knew was going. Boo. Maybe I stay at home and slice my wrists open in the tub because no one understands me. You never know.

Now Twitter has removed the ability for us to choose the first option, meaning that I can no longer see conversations that are happening unless I already follow both of the parties involved. Those conversations are invisible to me, as if they aren’t taking place. Since Twitter is ostensibly a service dedicated to networking and building connections between people, this makes absolutely no sense. Especially as what they took away was not mandatory before, but something people could easily turn off for themselves.

Twitter needs open @replies for two reasons:

1. Reading one side of a conversation between someone you know and someone you don’t know is a good way to get to know new people. Taking this feature away prevents new connections forming spontaneously. Consistently seeing what looked like funny/interesting messages directed at one person would make me interested in following them. It’s probably how I also gained most of my followers too, since they saw their friends talking to me. If you think about this in meatspace terms, it’s like being out at the bar and seeing your friend having an animated discussion with someone you don’t know. If that looks good enough you’d probably want to walk up and join them, and be introduced to the new person, right? Well, the way Twitter has now configured things, it’s like every time your friend walks away from you at the bar to talk to someone else, they become invisible – as does the person they’re talking to. So you’re left standing on your own with a watered-down drink in your hands, wondering why there’s no one cool to meet in this place. Wow, that’s really sociable of you, Twitter. Now, I could make periodic visits to my friends’ pages, checking who they’re following, clicking each person’s avatar to read their recent tweets (if their stream is even public) and deciding whether to follow them or not. But realistically, I won’t do that. And I could wait for people I follow to tell me specifically to follow other users – but many times they won’t do that. I certainly never pimp out any of my friends or tell other people to follow them.
2. Some of Twitter’s most-followed members converse with a larger audience via @replies directed to people that the rest of their followers don’t already follow. Taking this feature away breaks the communication model for those users. Take @neilhimself (Neil Gaiman) for instance. He is a big Twitter user at the moment, and has more than 300k followers. People ask him lots of questions, and he is kind enough to reply to many of them. Of course he doesn’t want to reply to the same question over and over, but it was easy enough to follow his stream and see that he tweeted @ someone else about the book signing you were interested in, or why he didn’t get a haircut, or whatever. If you have a look at his tweetstream, it’s 90% @replies to his followers. Yeah, that means he tweets a lot, and I have to filter out a lot of noise. But at the same time, I also learn the answers to questions I didn’t even know I wanted to ask. It’s impractical for Twitter to assume that all of us will start to follow all 300k followers of his, just in case he answers a question, posts a great link or recommends a book or a song or a site  in a reply directed to someone else.

What they should have done.

What Twitter SHOULD have done is implement selective open replies. Let users choose how much they want to read from each of the people they follow. I have been craving this feature for a long time, because people use Twitter in different ways, some of which are interesting to me, and some of which aren’t.

• There are some people I follow who use Twitter mostly as a broadcast medium. They post interesting observations and cool links, and they have some limited back and forth discussions with other interesting people. I want to continue to read their all of their tweets, so that I can eavesdrop on these interesting conversations and find new people to follow.
• There are other people I follow who use Twitter more as an IM client, constantly @replying everyone in the universe, and seemingly about the dullest things in the world. There are people whose individual tweets I like, but I have nevertheless unfollowed because they @replied too many people that I didn’t know or want to know. For those people I would like to turn off following @replies unless I follow both parties already.

I am not a programmer, I don’t know what offering these options would take to implement. But I do know that dumbing things down is only going to piss people off and cause extra problems when users try to circumvent the system. Right now you can get around the @replies thing by adding some extra characters in front of the person’s name.

For instance: if you don’t follow @superbadgirl, and I start out a tweet with “@superbadgirl” the system recognizes that as an @reply and you won’t see it. However if I say “To: @superbadgirl” or “Dear @superbadgirl” or even “: @superbadgirl” then it WILL show up in your stream, because the system just sees that as a normal tweet of mine, in which I mention another person. While this is helpful to ME, because I like to see @replies, it’s going to piss off some people who follow me, and had purposely turned off @replies. Now they have no way to turn this off, because I am doing it manually. They don’t want their streams clogged up with my tweets, and I understand that. But I am nevertheless angry because I can’t read what I want to read. And aggravating your users by preventing some of them reading what they want to read, causing them to force other people to read  a bunch of shit they don’t want to read is FAIL, Twitter – big time FAIL.

This is poorly thought out, poorly communicated and very, very aggravating. I expected better of the people at Twitter, and I am shocked that they did not better assess their members usage patterns before implementing this change. A 10-person focus group would have raised all the same concerns I just expressed here, and taken maybe an hour out of someone’s day.

WTPF Twitter? Get your shit together.

   Filed under: Microblogging, marketing mayhem, the feck? | Comments (6)