Twitter Hides Replies From Your Friends

Last night, Twitter removed your ability to see @replies from people you follow to people you don’t follow. This is a massive change, because this is one of the primary methods for Twitter users to find other interesting people to follow.

If your friends are talking to someone you don’t know, it’s very possible that you would be interested in tallking to that person too. Twitter have removed your ability to see that conversation happening, even though it’s in public.

The folks at Twitter believe that this is just a “small settings update”, saying:

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.

We should be thanking them for making the internet less confusing for us!

However, they do acknowledge the importance of discovery:

Spotting new folks in tweets is an interesting way to check out new profiles and find new people to follow. Despite this update, you’ll still see mentions or references linking to people you don’t follow… We’ll be introducing better ways to discover and follow interesting accounts as we release more features in this space.

That means that you will see mentions – where a Twitter name is in the middle of a Tweet, but not at the start.

This change has not gone down well with the Twitter population – #fixreplies and #twitterfail are trending top of the Twitter Search right now. The huge outcry over this issue is reminiscent of Facebook’s recent Terms and Conditions update: hopefully we’ll see a quick reversal of this change.

Some great commentary over at ReadWriteWeb, particularly this comment from Michael putting the issue in context:

The change today removes one setting — the option to see all replies from people you follow, whether or not you follow the target [...]

As of May 2008, this option was in use by less than 2% of Twitter users — the default is, and has been, to see only replies to those you also follow [...]

I disagree with the implication that 2% of users is either a small number, or even a valid statistic to use given the amount of spam accounts on Twitter.

Jeff from BrickandClick has a great follow-up on this:

I’d bet that the only reason “2%” of users chose the now unavailable feature is that the vast majority assumed they were seeing ‘all tweets’ from people they followed. Once this all get out in the open, and Twitter returns this feature, it’ll be more understood, and a few million people will choose it, and end up discovering a whole new piece of the conversation pie they were missing. Great way to discover new and interesting people your connections are chatting with.

I’m in complete agreement.

Workaround For Twitter Censor

I tried testing a few workarounds. They’ve already told us how – don’t include the @reply at the very start of your message. So the best way to ensure your friends read all of your messages is to simply add some fudge text to the start, e.g.:

"To @reply Your message here."

or

"@@reply Your message here."

Using a single space like follows does NOT work, unfortunately (this would have been the optimal solution):

" @reply Your message here."

However, this does not deal with the problem that you cannot view your friends replies unless they use the hack above. The only solution for that is to setup a search for each friend you want to view all public tweets from, or view their Twitter profile page, neither of which scales.

I hope Twitter decides to put back this option, and I hope that service providers learn that removing user choice is almost always a bad thing to do. Let me know what you think via the comments below, or on Twitter at @AMcDermott.

Update @4:40pm

Wow, this blog post got loads of RTs, shows what a big issue this is to Twitter users – Twitter must listen!

I’ve got 5 minutes between meetings, so I’m going to try respond quickly and succintly to some really good points raised either in reponse below, or to me on Twitter.

Josh had a note about the above workaround breaking the Summize “Show Conversation” feature:

Unfortunately none of his followers got to see that message ;)

But seriously, the workaround does break functionality of many Twitter applications that figure out threaded conversations from the @ sign usage. The answer here is to re-enable the setting so that we don’t need to use workarounds. And it is kinda funny that non of @kitson’s followers would have seen his message to me :)

Ok, in the comments we have a long reply from Michael at Black Belt Productivity. I apologise in advance, I really don’t have time to answer every point right now, but there are several things I disagree with. Michael’s text is in quotes sections, my replies below each:

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.

Yes, there are plenty of ways – but personally I (and many others by the looks of things) find that watching who my friends are talking to is THE SINGLE most useful way of finding people to follow.

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.

It’s not a democracy, but people can vote with their feet. Look at what happened with the Facebook T&C changes recently: Facebook reversed their decision in hours. Twitter is censoring our conversations here and we have the right to voice dissent.

I applaud twitter for turning OFF the firehose to make this a better service, and more importantly, an enjoyable experience.

I do not applaud Twitter for removing the ability for us to see who our friends are talking to. It was always optional, and you always had the right to ensure you didn’t have a “firehose” incoming.

At the end of the day, Twitter has removed user choice, and those of us who used this feature are rightly kicking up a fuss about that.

Ok, that’s all I’ve got time for now – please leave your comments below or @@reply me @AMcDermott on Twitter ;)