Twitter Replies Change Cripples Discovery

Twitter have made what they describe as small settings update which has caused a storm of protest. Even Twitter superstar @stephenfry (490,000 followers) has joined in the criticism.

So what exactly is this “small settings update”? From now onwards, is someone you’re following sends an @reply to someone you’re not following you won’t see that reply in your tweet stream. Let’s try to explain that in human terms.

Imagine that Alice is following Bob, Bob is following Carole but Alice is not following Carole. Carole posts a tweet and Bob posts a reply to @Carole. Previously Alice would have seen Bob’s reply, now she won’t.

Why the change? Because Twitter has deemed that “seeing one-sided fragments via replies sent to folks you don’t follow in your timeline is undesirable”. They have a point, it can be distracting. However it can also be very useful.

Seeing @replies is a great way to discover new and interesting people. In the example above, Alice may be following Bob because he’s interested in widgets. Carole may be a widget expert, however the chance of Alice ever discovering her has been greatly reduced by this change. To be fair Twitter do recognise the importance of discovery and say they will “be introducing better ways to discover and follow interesting accounts”. But those features don’t exist yet.

Whether or not you consider this change a blessing or a curse depends on how you use Twitter. If you like to chat with a small group of friends, you might welcome it. If you use Twitter to discover and connect with new people then you might want to post a comment with the #fixreplies tag.

The silly thing about all this is that it could have been avoided by giving users more control over which tweets to see. Instead Twitter took a “we know best” approach – with the result that #fixreplies is currently the number one trending term.

This isn’t just a technical fail, it’s a PR own goal from a company that really should know better.

Update: Twitter CEO Evan Williams has tweeted:

Reading people’s thoughts on the replies issue. We’re considering alternatives. Thanks for your feedback.