#Twitterwin not #Twitterfail

The tweetsunami of rage against Twitter for changing their @reply policy seems to have missed one of the main benefits of the change: it's now OK to send replies you otherwise wouldn't dream of sending.

 Suppose someone called RandomTweeter who isn't a follower tweets something you want to reply to. They're not a follower, so you can't Direct Message them. All you can do is write a tweet beginning @RandomTweeter.

 Until yesterday's change, that tweet would go out to ALL your followers (except the tiny minority who had discovered that buried in Twitter's options was the choice to switch off tweets that are replies to other people). But the last thing I want to do is annoy followers by tweeting mundane replies to individuals. Indeed that's become a killer problem on Twitter. All noise, no signal. That's what the change is trying to address. As things stood, the choices were: ignore the comment (which might be rude, and could leave out there something that should have been addressed) OR add to Twitter noise with something of interest to only a few.

 After the change, that tweet is seen only by those of your followers who also follow @RandomTweeter. So now I'll be willing to respond knowing that a far higher percentage of anyone who reads it will be interested. This is going to encourage groups to coalesce and conversations to evolve that otherwise wd never have happened.

 The protesters are saying this means that they're losing the benefit of serendipitous discovery through eavesdropping. C'mon. There are dozens of ways of serendipitous discovery on Twitter. Search any word you care about for starters. Or just click onto the full twitter stream of someone you admire to see who they've been replying to. It's all there. And if you want your reply to be seen by all your followers, that's easy too. Just place @RandomTweeter in the middle of your reply.

  This, below, is the choice that has been oh-so-cruelly snatched away.

Personally I think it's a good thing. Twitter's whole ethos is based on less is more. The protesters upset about a choice being taken away are missing the fact that in a connected system individual choices impact the entire system. If Twitter have the balls to stick with the change, I think we'll start seeing more thoughtful replies being written, and real conversation starting.

 (And if they don't, I hope there's a massive campaign to encourage people to select the middle choice above, which is what we all now have. Without that, I for one, will not be replying in public.)   

Scott Hepburn, this was genius...

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32 responses
I'm pretty sure that only @ replies to the people I'm following was the default setting. If not, the simple solution would be to make it default. That solves the "problem" while still allowing those users who don't think it's a problem to see all @ replies. Why worry about creating noise if only those who choose to hear the noise hear it? I personally go back and forth between settings. I think your logic is flawed here.
— Gus
Thank you for articulating the case for the modification so well.
— Kathleen Buckley
" (except the tiny minority who had discovered that buried in Twitter's options was the choice to switch off tweets that are replies to other people)."

Yes, but the middle option WAS the default starting last year. As of May 12, 2008, when they announced that on their blog (http://blog.twitter.com/2008/05/how-replies-work-on-twitter-and-how.html).

It's not the default if you use an outside program like Tweetdeck or anything, but that's something that Twitter can't control, and the developers of each program should implement as option.

You've just as likely been able to do this already, I'm fine with making it the default option for all users and they can change it if they want, but give the option, and Twitter should have explained it better. Poor job on user experience today.

— JohnnyMcNugget
I understand the perspective that you may not want to see @replies from people you follow to people you don't, but why is it good to not let people make this decision on their own, like they did before?

I agree that there are other ways to find new people to follow, but wouldn't you agree that the most natural way to do find new followers is to see the interaction between people you ALREADY follow and their followers? It's a way of expanding your circle of friends in a natural way that somewhat models the "real world" of meeting new people.

— Andy Mueller
I don't necessarily disagree, but I can point to about 10-20 of the 140 people i follow and am followed by who are people who I discovered, or discovered me via the seeing all @ replies.

What's great about seeing all the @ replies is that it's passive networking. You don't have to actively search out new people, you can see the people that interact with people you already know and develop communities of those people. By knowing one local webcomic/artist, I now am part of an entire community of local artists simply because I saw my friend talking to his friends.

Heck, I wouldn't have found you if someone hadn't retweeted you.

Even if you're right, the option was already there for people to not see @replies to people they don't follow. Why didn't they just change it so that it was the default setting? Why take away something from people who liked the feature when people who were complaining about it already had a way to disable it?

— greg
You are forgetting something: everybody uses twitter differently! I might want the noise and find what my friends are talking about with other persons.
Also, your thinking process as a flaw: the "serendipityness" value of new findings decreases a lot if now it has to start with searches and the messages do not just come in.
The new process might apply to you and that is why there was an option on settings that allowed you to choose that option.
Removing the option all together is cutting twitter power to the null.
I agree that it might reduce noise, but in the process it also reduces a lot of useful information.
— Jose Sa
A few points:

It goes way beyond just discovery - discovery is merely the beginning; it goes to the actual ongoing following of conversations. Without even addressing discoverey, today I have missed out on 90% of what I would normally see.

The idea of searching for a conversation your friends might be having is ludicrous.

Click the full stream of someone I've been following? I had the full stream of everyone I was following on my twitter page - are you really saying it's no big deal to now have to have to do over 600 clicks to see the full stream of each person I'm following? And again a few minutes later? Etc.

As others have pointed out, what you'd like was already the default. And since you consider the option to change was buried then you have little to worry about.

I believed the replies I was reading were thoughtful and the conversations I was watching were real. Thanks for telling me I was wrong.

One person's noise is another person's signal. It's arrogant to try and define general rules as to the quality of individual tweets.

— Eolaí gan Fhéile
Ha! Thanks for the plug, Chris.

While I disagree with some of your points, the irony of this TwitterStorm is that we'll all get over it by next week. Twitter may heed our protests, they may not, but it's irrelevant -- nobody's going to quit Twitter over this, and it probably coincides with a bigger vision that will ensure Twitter's vitality in the long term.

— A visitor
If the choice was one sided, then it would seem like the logical and smart response would be to add options for the side which lacks options. Let people create subgroups of their followers who can see only tweets that the person wants them to. It's not much different than the protected tweets setting, and there have been sites doing similar things for years (livejournal for example).
— greg
Chris, that's the point of Twitter though -- public conversation. If you would not want your message visible to the public but only to that person, DM them. Or send them a Facebook message. Or Gchat, IM, email, etc. Twitter differentiated itself by being a public conversation that anyone can follow along with. Now we can only see the question asked, and none of the answers.

On a side note, has anyone tried to just add a letter before the @reply? It seems like that would break the algorithm they are using to qualify not posting publicly. Something like "-@Chris" would probably do it.

— JohnnyMcNugget
Hmmm...I never thought about not being able to post a private reply before, but we can now. That sheds new light on this modification. Thanks!
— judel
With all due respect, I think you're dead wrong - and yes, I might be opinionated.

I am convinced that it will turn twitter into something less distinguishable from the old instant messaging, facebook, forums and what not. I do not want that. I don't want information to be walled in, hidden. I don't want to make twitter even more of an exclusive echo chamber than it was until now. I want transparency and open participation, a level playing field. I want to still be able to discover new interesting people by random chance, have my curiosity stimulated, read other perspectives by chance, listen in at will.

I strongly disagree that not seeing replies from others to people you are following it will enable better conversations. Why not just continuing using IM, mail or whatever if you need to keep everything under wraps?. Please don't try to make twitter out to be something that it IMO is not.

Search is not a replacement for seeing all (public) replies. That's like comparing push to pull, search to links, apples to oranges, color to smell, sight to sound. You wouldn't know who and what to search for anyhoo because you can't see the conversation at all. It's like it doesn't exist now.

To me the magic of twitter is that it used to be anything that you wanted it to be. Now it seems one of the major USPs for me has been steamrolled away. I feel like one of the main ingredients of the magic twittersauce has been discontinued overnight.

However, once the cat is out, you can never put it back in.

I don't usually plug my own boring posts, but I find the issue at hand rather important, so I'll mention that I wrote up my initial thoughts after reading the first RWW post here: http://stopmebeforeiblogagain.com/twitter-muzzled/ if someone should be interested in reading my first take in length.

@blacktar

— blacktar
Chris, I think part of your perspective comes with being a "celebrity" user. you have over 193,000 followers, so perhaps you feel it is rude to burden them with the noise of some minor reply to some follower who tweeted you. For the rest of us, maybe that's not such a concern. This is actually an opportunity for new features, rather than taking features away. Certainly there would be an opportunity for an app that allows you to choose not only whether you see all @ replies, but who you see all @ replies from and who you only see some from. The possible permutations of choice are endless, if the choice is allowed.
— Gus
The passion around this issue is amazing. JohnnyMcNugget thanks for that blog link. If Twitter is right and 98% of people already had the current status as default setting, then it's impressive how much noise the remaining 2% are making...

Thanks, all, for fascinating comments.

— Chris Anderson
Scott, maybe you're right about the long-term vision of twitter - but you're wrong when you say nobody is going to quit twitter over this. It's about 12 hours now since the change impacted on me, and I quit 2 hours later when it was apparent that Twitter weren't listening. Others are considering quitting depending on Twitter's reaction to this.

I think the strength of how much this feature was loved by so many has been seriously underestimated by many.

Even if people are looking for a reply feature that lies somewhere between a DM and a fully public reply - killing most of the twtterstream for a huge number of early adopters and loyal enthusiasts is a very radical and clumsy way to achieve this.

— Eolaí gan Fhéile
It's still #twitterfail. Especially for anyone who happened to follow someone, for example @NASA, that has terribly interesting @replies with answers to questions that maybe hadn't entered your mind yet. Considering that I had twenty of these, why is it considered a "superior system" for me to have to have open several Twitter searches or search panes to follow what is being said by people who are actually being interesting?

Oh? They're not a full percent, and thus can be marginalized? Yeah. Okay then. I won't be quitting Twitter, I'm just going to embrace antisocial jackassery. I'm in the minority; it doesn't matter.

— Andrew Vienne
I think you're right that most people won't quit twitter. Facebook faces these things all the time, but few stop using it. The interesting question is, would Twitter care if people did leave? I don't exactly get Twitter's business model, do they make any money at all? Do they lose any money if they lose users?
— Gus
I personally think that Twitter has failed here, but only because they took away the OPTION to turn off @replies to unknown people. I think the option should be reinstated. However I think a better compromise would be to manually select which people you can see @replies for. For example I could turn off @stephenfry's @replies, but keep my friend's @baldarmo (who I know personally).
I realize this would be quite a lot of work for Twitter, and I suppose for current users (going through 200-odd people doesn't really appeal to me) but I think the compromise of signal to noise would then be manually controllable.
— Ali Smith
JohnnyMcNugget:
Your link also has an interesting thing: The comments. Most of them state the usefulness of all @replies. this was over a year ago so twitter always new that it was something wanted.

Chris: I don't really understand why you would want others to have the option selected. Is nothing that interferes with they way You use twitter: only them! Why would you like to hide the answers from the general public? If they are so private then you can dm them instead.

— Jose Sa
Chris, the point you seem to miss entirely is that this was already the default option -

The people you worry about boring with mundane @replies had to choose to see those @replies in the first place, they wanted to see them.

So this idea that they will just turn it off for everyone is as arrogant and misguided as it first sounds.

Definite twitter fail.

— Colin Lenton
@Eolai My argument that nobody would quit Twitter was a bit of hyperbole for effect. Yes, some people will quit Twitter. People quit Twitter every day. In fact, Twitter was having a huge retention problem before this (although, whether it was really a "problem" depends on your POV).

However, the number of people who will quit Twitter because of this is infinitesimal relative to the total user population. 99.9% of users will stay.

@Chris I believe the default option at Twitter is/was "Only show @replies sent to people I also follow." And Twitter didn't even make a loud announcement when it rolled out the option in the first place, so most users didn't even realize they were missing out on conversations.

I only discovered the feature when I noticed my favorite Social Media power users -- folks like Mack Collier, Todd Defren, Jeremiah Owyang -- appeared to not be Tweeting much. A little homework revealed that I was missing MOST of their Tweets because the conversations involved people I wasn't following.

— Scott Hepburn
It now seems this was done partly for engineering reasons. http://tr.im/lgya Hmmm... if this was about limiting exploding message numbers, a better strategy might have been to set the default to 'no @replies', and keep the other two choices. Switched defaults have none of the emotional provocation of removed choices, even though their impact likely greater.
— Chris Anderson
Seems to me the real issue here, and why folks are annoyed, is that Twitter didn't have to make this change. They could have just defaulted everyone's setting to "@reply from folks I follow" and posted a note on your home page telling you they had done so. If you so desired, you could alter the setting to show all @reply messages.

For those that want to increase signal and reduce noise, problem solved. For those that like it loud -- option exists.

Personally, I think this is Twitter doing some "free" product research or looking for ways to cut costs but it certainly isn't a customer centric strategy no matter how you cut it. The #FixReplies hashtag pretty clearly shows that.

@TomMartin

— tom martin
Now you've hit on it, Chris. Before that "OMG! I'm in a bar..." Tweet, I Tweeted that this change probably had more to do with a popular use of the medium putting an immense strain on Twitter.

How they chose to address that challenge, though, (i.e., not seeking user input) was the biggest mistake...very 1.0 of them.

This "change" reminds me of 6 months ago, when Twitter stopped the "Find people on Twitter" service, only to bring it back with scaled back functionality: No more keyword searches of user profiles.

Growing pains? Sure. PR slip-up? You bet. Bad for profits? I doubt it.

— Scott Hepburn
Oh for goodness sake. Why doesn't twitter just make it so you can DM anyone regardless of whether they follow you and give us our @reply options back?

...and maybe even set the default to 'all @replies' (but of course keep the option to switch it off if you have big foll don't like 'noise'). I was shocked to learn that if I posted a tweet beginning '@X and all' only X would have seen it. I assumed that when I followed someone, it meant I would see everything they tweeted, including @replies. Looking back now, lots of my tweets that were meant to be 'public' weren't.

My verdict, in case you couldn't already guess? #twitterfail

p.s. @Chris 'If Twitter is right and 98% of people already had the current status as default setting, then it's impressive how much noise the remaining 2% are making...' I think maybe you don't get it - you would not have had to see their noise unless you decided you wanted to and had gone in and changed the default setting to 'all @ replies'.

— Karen James
I'm going to wait and see what they do next. So far, whatever about what they had to do, how they've handled something they know so many people hold huge affection for has been appalling.

My take on #twitterfail in cartoon form: http://url.ie/1kg8

— Eolaí gan Fhéile
All that's doing is encouraging gossip about people which will only eventually come back around to you to bite you in your buttox.

Seriously. There is NO win in this situation. It's an utter #twitterfail and they need to #fixreplies now.

— Shay
Here's Twitter's announced response.
http://tr.im/lhDo
So now, the risk is *more* noise than before if people do lots of @reply updates without using the 'Reply' button. Sigh.
— Chris Anderson
And much less usefull replies. The link was extremely important to put things in context. The ratio garbage/usefull information will just increase! I hope twitter will find a fix for this soon. They are nutering their own product!
— Jose Sa
@Chris It sounds like you'd be in favor of the new "per user" opt-in/opt-out of @replies feature. I wonder which feature -- the opt-in/opt-out or the "you'll see all @replies if somebody you follow manually types @username -- will override the other...
— Scott Hepburn
thankssssssssssssssssss
— 4load
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