Comments on: Twitter Changes @replies; Users Up In Arms

By: Ripple6 Blog » How to Defeat the Revolutionaries

Ripple6 Blog » How to Defeat the Revolutionaries — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:00:22 +0000

[...] to you to be a small change to the system and the users revolt. This is being experienced by the operators of Twitter, the exploding social microblogging site. Twitter made a small change to the way their system [...]

By: olhoni

olhoni — Thu, 14 May 2009 14:54:14 +0000

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.

By: Meryl Evans

Meryl Evans — Thu, 14 May 2009 12:14:54 +0000

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.”

By: Simon Mackie

Simon Mackie — Thu, 14 May 2009 11:36:14 +0000

@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?

By: Veshengro

Veshengro — Thu, 14 May 2009 05:59:22 +0000

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!

By: Dan

Dan — Wed, 13 May 2009 23:26:07 +0000

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!

By: Scott Blitstein

Scott Blitstein — Wed, 13 May 2009 19:34:01 +0000

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.

By: Simon Mackie

Simon Mackie — Wed, 13 May 2009 18:45:24 +0000

Twitter has now changed its story, saying that the feature was changed for scalability reasons: http://mashable.com/2009/05/13/twitter-fixreplies/

By: Simon Mackie

Simon Mackie — Wed, 13 May 2009 18:14:07 +0000

Aliza has followed up with a great post on customer power in the social media age.

By: The Growing Feedback Fiasco

The Growing Feedback Fiasco — Wed, 13 May 2009 18:01:41 +0000

[...] media darling Twitter “silently” implemented a fundamental feature change — removing the ability to view @replies from people you are not following — and the Twitterstream is in turmoil with tweets and retweets of displeasure, protest, [...]