Tuesday
12May2009
Twitter Screws Up
Tuesday, May 12, 2009 at 11:11PM
I don't often use this space to rant, but I'm up early with a small child and I'm a bit peeved at the moment. And my peevishness has something to do with software development, so it's moderately on-topic.
The target: Twitter, which in a "small settings update" decided to make things much less useful for those of us who use the service to discover new people. It used to be that if you followed Joe and he tweeted "@Mary: Like your new blog post on wombats" you'd see that update in your Twitterstream even if you didn't follow Mary (more precisely, you could turn on an option to make this happen). Then if you were interested in wombats, you could click through to @Mary's account and decide whether you wanted to follow her. Easy serendipity.
Now the option is gone, "to better reflect how folks are using Twitter regarding replies" and a unilateral declaration that the old behavior is undesirable. Horseshit. If it's confusing to new users, then change the default for the setting, don't remove it entirely. Seems to me that one of two things is going on here. Either this change was necessary for performance reasons (in which case Twitter's spin on the issue is a lie), or else this is another instance of the pernicious developer arrogance that says "we know better than our users." Either way, it stinks.
Will this be the end of Twitter? Nope. But if the change isn't reversed (which will mean Twitter is deaf to the crescendo of #fixreplies tweets), it'll make the service less useful to a significant number of users. And that's a shame.
Update: In a new blog post, Biz writes: "The engineering team reminded me that there were serious technical reasons why that setting had to go or be entirely rebuilt." Compare that with the wording from the first post: "However, receiving one-sided fragments via replies sent to folks you don't follow in your timeline is undesirable. Today's update removes this undesirable and confusing option." It is difficult to come to any conclusion from those two statements other than the simple: Twitter lied.
I'll miss the feature. I'll miss even more the thought that I could trust Twitter to be open and transparent with its users.
The target: Twitter, which in a "small settings update" decided to make things much less useful for those of us who use the service to discover new people. It used to be that if you followed Joe and he tweeted "@Mary: Like your new blog post on wombats" you'd see that update in your Twitterstream even if you didn't follow Mary (more precisely, you could turn on an option to make this happen). Then if you were interested in wombats, you could click through to @Mary's account and decide whether you wanted to follow her. Easy serendipity.
Now the option is gone, "to better reflect how folks are using Twitter regarding replies" and a unilateral declaration that the old behavior is undesirable. Horseshit. If it's confusing to new users, then change the default for the setting, don't remove it entirely. Seems to me that one of two things is going on here. Either this change was necessary for performance reasons (in which case Twitter's spin on the issue is a lie), or else this is another instance of the pernicious developer arrogance that says "we know better than our users." Either way, it stinks.
Will this be the end of Twitter? Nope. But if the change isn't reversed (which will mean Twitter is deaf to the crescendo of #fixreplies tweets), it'll make the service less useful to a significant number of users. And that's a shame.
Update: In a new blog post, Biz writes: "The engineering team reminded me that there were serious technical reasons why that setting had to go or be entirely rebuilt." Compare that with the wording from the first post: "However, receiving one-sided fragments via replies sent to folks you don't follow in your timeline is undesirable. Today's update removes this undesirable and confusing option." It is difficult to come to any conclusion from those two statements other than the simple: Twitter lied.
I'll miss the feature. I'll miss even more the thought that I could trust Twitter to be open and transparent with its users.
Reader Comments (8)
Greetings,
Right there with you w/r/t small child. :) Mine just turned 1, and I was mindlessly following the battle 'twixt #twatlight and #fixreplies while he runs around his room, expending energy, augering in on sleep once more...
Anyhow, there were some good notes in a comment thread, which said that (1) the default had been for a while to only show @replies to folks you already followed, and (2) the other option was only used by about 2% of users.
I'm going to guess that they determined/decided it was confusing (which it would be if it were the default, imo), determined/decided it would get in the way of other features they were building (performance or complexity-wise), and kicked it to the curb, using only the first as their explanation. It's not a _lie_ because it's true, it's just not the _only_ reason.
I'm all 'meh' about it, because it's not a feature I'd ever use. I have trouble keeping up with the ~35 folks I'm following already, and adding a crap-ton of half-conversations would drive me battier. I can't even begin to _IMAGINE_ how you read ~530 folks, with all their half-conversations in a day, and do anything else.
Still, there's obviously a lot of anger out there, as witnessed by the trouncing #fixreplies is giving #twatlight but...is it from folks who used that setting in the first place? I don't know...
-- Morgan
A strange move indeed for Twitter to remove such a simple feature, and with all the recent celeb accounts being added to Twitter I'm beginning to think that Twitter is about to be a victim of it's own success, but I could be wrong.
It would have been better to re-factor this feature so that users are opted out by default and then allow more savvy users to opt in to the replies feature.
Taking away such a small feature away from Twitter has meant that I don't see as many interesting tweets as I would like. Not good when I follow a broad range of different users with different topics.
It will be interesting to see what the next few days bring.
Hmm, my initial reaction was anger, but I guess I'm confused at what they did. You wrote:
"It used to be that if you followed Joe and he tweeted “@Mary: Like your new blog post on wombats” you’d see that update in your Twitterstream even if you didn’t follow Mary (more precisely, you could turn on an option to make this happen). Then if you were interested in wombats, you could click through to @Mary’s account and decide whether you wanted to follow her. Easy serendipity."
I can still do that. For instance, I saw someone tweet @MikeG1 on this topic and I clicked on your profile. as near as I can tell, they only turned off stuff related to notification, not your tweetstream.
I'll freely admit I could be missing something, and certainly I don't support taking options away. But as of right now, I can't figure out what it is I'm not getting. FWIW, I use tweetdeck, so perhaps this is only a web feature.
@egtalbot
The only thing they're blocking is pure replies, apparently. So, given that you follow Joe but not Mary, if Joe says:
@Mary: Great blog entry! <== You won't see this
RT @Mary: Twitter is stinky <== You will see this
I love my friend @Mary <== You will see this
Thank-you, Mike! I think you are right. I forgot a ways back they posted something about differentiating between "mentions" and replies.
Still a poor decision on their part IMO. All they need is better help, not to take away options.
THANK YOU TWITTER for doing something about endless drather of noise! There are PLENTY of ways for people to find new followers. They don't have to rely on one-sided conversations with people they already know.
I take my twitter presence pretty seriously. I try to engage in conversations with my (human) followers to make the experience enjoyable. To say that folks did not know that silencing the folks that you don't follow is a COP OUT! Whenever I join a new website, the first thing that I do is go through my Account Settings, and right there under Notices was a pulldown that let you specify how your Replies were handled (there was even an explanation, if I recall).
People seem to forget that twitter is NOT a democracy. People do not paying to use the service. Biz, Evan and the twitter team get to decide what happen to the service that THEY CREATED. I read one of my followers and he said "Put replies back to the way they were! You're going to lose a lot of people this way - epic fail" REALLY! You are going to leave twitter because you have a little more work to find new people. Come on, that is the most ridiculous thing that I have ever heard.
I applaud twitter for turning OFF the firehose to make this a better service, and more importantly, an enjoyable experience.
Yeah, feels like have the point of twitter was taken away with that move. I don't know, but we'll see..
How do I Twitter my Flickr photos?