Twitter Puts a Muzzle on Your Friends: Goodbye People I Never Knew (Updated)
It's not exactly a silent spring, but a change made to Twitter's settings this afternoon has already greatly reduced the tweets its users are witness to. In what the company called a small settings update, users no longer see public replies sent by friends to people they themselves are not following. (Fragmented conversations, they are called.) This isn't a small change at all; it's big, and it's bad. The new setting eliminates serendipitous social discovery.
Are you familiar with The Onion's biting political commentator Baratunde Thurston, cyborg anthropologist Amber Case or Google's Kevin Marks? If not, that's too bad - they are all really interesting people I talk with a lot on Twitter. If you're not following them, though, you'll never discover them through my public conversations again. As far as you're concerned, those conversations just silently disappeared.
Update: For the latest in our ongoing coverage of this story, see this speculation about the technical explanation for why Twitter made this change.
Update again: In less than 24 hours, Twitter has changed this policy. Click here to read how.
The new policy isn't something you have to opt-in to. It's not something you can opt-out of. It's true for people who use 3rd-party Twitter clients to read their Tweets. It's more fundamentally closed than Facebook is; on that site I may not be able to view the profiles of strangers talking to my friends, but I can see that the conversations are happening and I can read the comments. This new Twitter policy breaks one of the fundamental rules of social activity streams: that I can discover new people by seeing who is conversing with the people I already know.
It's crazy. Imagine the new users who are only following celebrities. Who will they be exposed to in this quieter new stream?
Information overload is a problem that people complain about a lot, but that's how Twitter works. There has to be some other way to deal with complaints about "stranger replies." Perhaps it's a tab or setting, but this silent hiding of public conversations your friends are having risks removing some of the most magical parts of Twitter. I love discovering new people through the people I already know. I found out about this policy through a Tweet from the New York Times' Patrick LaForge, who always Tweets about interesting things. Too bad I'll never hear about his friends again.
There's no way this is going to last. I'm in shock that the policy was put in place at all.
Update: Just after we put this post up, the Twitter blog post was revised to include the following:
"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. For example, you'll continue to see, "Ev meeting with @biz about work stuff" even if you don't follow @biz. We'll be introducing better ways to discover and follow interesting accounts as we release more features in this space."
Our response? While recommendations are interesting, I'd like to use my own judgment in deciding who's interesting enough to follow. The people that individual friends of mine are conversing with is one of the best ways to do that.
Update: Reader "Michael" left the most thorough and helpful comment in defense of this new policy that we've seen, below. It's worth reading.
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This is beyond assinine. Apparently @ev and @biz would rather everyone just tweeted "what are you doing right now" so we can read things like "Eating a sandwich."
Twitter management just shut off the method by which most serious Twitter users have found most of the folks that they're following.
Posted by: aaronhockley.com
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May 12, 2009 8:45 PM
steve gillmor, FTW. he just doesn't bother with the @. fixes that problem...track fixed the rest. Guess Twitter Search might be in for a workout.
Posted by: Karoli
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May 12, 2009 8:47 PM
Karoli I guess that's one good way to protest this :-)
Posted by: Jesse Stay
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May 12, 2009 8:51 PM
Honestly, being able to see public replies was one of the reasons I enjoyed using Twitter. Your spot on with the Facebook comment, and the fact that social media is all about DISCOVERY! I hope they change it back soon. Somebody start a petition! Lol
This post hits the nail on the head for me.
Posted by: Derrick
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May 12, 2009 8:55 PM
This is the closest I've come to understanding this. Twitter's blog post on it was mambo dog face in the banana patch. Does this mean that when you post, "I love @bunco," I will not get that post in my Twitter stream if I don't follow @bunco? If this is so, it's dorktarded. Half the people on my Twitter stream swam into my ken in this fashion.
So... the obvious question is Why? This look like preparation to monetize to anyone else?
Ridiculous - W H Y ?
I have one question tho, will this apply through out ur Twitter use? As in....if I'm using Destroy Twitter or Twittelator or any Twitter app, would this new rule apply to those applications as well or is it just for Twitter use via the main website?
Did Twitter give a reason for this? Complaints about privacy? Problems with the programming and master twitter database? What?
And in the scale of importance, why doesn't twitter cut the all annoying AUTO DM feature. That I could understand (and appreciate). Maybe they are smoking too much of that twitter bud over there in twitter land.
Whatever the reasons, it greatly reduces the overall awesomeness of Twitter and yes, is asinine.
I'm bummed.
@misslizzyc
This is crazy! A lot of the people who find me and the ones I find are done through the conversations done through those I follow. They are talking about things we are interested in. Now the only way to discover them is to actually search for them? Who has time for that? I would rather join a conversation than hunt for one.
Besides blogging about it, try this too:
http://getsatisfaction.com/twitter/topics/we_want_all_replies_reinstated
Be Well!
@ECS_Dave
This used to be a setting. I turned it off as soon as I signed up. I follow who I want to follow. If they converse amongst each other, great. I don't need to hear their one-sided conversations towards people I don't care about.
Good riddance, I say.
I've found so many wonderful people via @ replies. In one example, the "person" in the middle of the conversation found it so amusing that we were holding a conversation in her twit stream - and it started something called dialogue - by the end of the day we had all made new followers and interesting people to follow. It's such a same.
The most bizarre and 'geeks gone stupid' decision Twitter could possibly make. A 'New Coke' move for the digital age.
@brickandclick
It is puzzling why the option went away, true, but the default setting was this very behavior: you can only see formal replies (tweets starting with @username) addressed to those in your network. You had to go in and change it to either show all replies or no replies.
That setting had been a source of confusion for a while. For a long time I thought that is what controlled the ability for other people not in my network to reply to me, which is why I opted to show all replies. Once I realized my mistake, however, I switched it to replies in my network as an experiment. Some very conversational people did get extremely quiet, but that wasn't a bad thing. The absence of one-sided conversation created room for more people and I expanded my network as a result.
The ideal solution is not only giving each person control of the replies (both ways, so you can also opt to shut off reply spam), but to allow you to fine tune your network by controlling reply behavior for specific users. For my less chatty friends—and not everyone uses Twitter for conversation or wants to read chat—seeing all replies is desired. For large-network conversationalists, however, the filtering is helpful.
Soundly stupid idea.
Seeing interesting conversations between a friend and a stranger is the primary way I find interesting folks to follow. (including @marshallk)
The only set of tweets this would make sense for would be for users responding to people with protected updates, and ONLY then because it is irritating to click over to see the other side of the conversation and get shut down. Only then.
Time to head over to getsatisfaction.. http://getsatisfaction.com/twitter/topics/we_want_all_replies_reinstated
Reminds me of the time when they took away SMS for a whole bunch of countries without prior warning..
So this is why twitter has been so quiet in the latest hours. This was a setting before, right? Anyway, this is ridiculous. Definitely this is the way I most seriously use twitter, and it's totally gone now. I hope it comes back soon.
Does this include retweets?
Most of my follows/followers came about this way. I'm sure a lot of tweeps can say the same. What is Twitter thinking? Do we have to #followfriday every day...too much for me.
BTW, I forgot to mention: this is a bad fix to the bigger problem that twitter can't follow conversations at all. The most you can get is the reference reply if your twitter client was kind enough to provide it (when you clicked reply), but you cannot ever discover how a conversation was followed up. E.g.: if someone asks his followers "what do you think of website X" there is no way besides the search to know who have replied to that and how the conversation ensued.
Recommendation still works via RTs and mentions of their name other than at the start. All this does is cut out the "@someone OK/LOL/whatever" noise. If you put the @ at the end instead of the beginning, everyone will see it. I liked being able to turn it on and off, but honestly, I kept it off most of the time.
This is a shame. They used to have a setting where you could choose to see all @ replies from people you follow, no @ replies from them, or only @ replies from people you follow to other people you also follow. The documentation for the setting apparently “confused” people so instead of rewriting it for clarity they’ve decided to take the choice away and make the third option the behavior of the system. Very stupid, user-unfriendly, and basically lazy, in my opinion.
bah, Twitter should embrace all that is flighty and everything resembling information overload
I totally agree with this. I really like watching what the people I follow are saying to others. Especially when they're smart arses like @Templesmith and @.
See, I don't know why they bothered to do this update at all. When I signed up to Twitter last year, you could go to your settings and choose to either see all @replies of the people you are following, or only the @replies they make to people you also follow. If the former was so annoying to people, then they should have just changed their settings to the latter instead of getting rid of the option to choose what you preferred to see on your /home page altogether.
And excuse me, but when did they consult the Twitter population before making this decision? It sounds to me like a whole bunch of lazy morons didn't bother checking their settings to figure out how to turn @replies to people they don't follow off, and instead wasted effort complaining to Twitter management.
As for Nate (May 12, 2009 9:14 PM), fine if you didn't like the information overload on your own page, but some of us would prefer to have the freedom to choose.
Well, let's get some terminology straight first --
Twitter uses 'replies' and 'mentions' inconsistently, which is unfortunate. When someone BEGINS a tweet with @username, that's a reply. When an @username appears anywhere else in a tweet, that's a mention.
Twitter's website Replies tab used to only show you actual replies; it now shows replies & mentions both, as do API clients. Regardless of your reply settings, you will continue to see mentions of your username.
The change today removes one setting -- the option to see all replies from people you follow, whether or not you follow the target -- that was originally implented in December 2007:
http://blog.twitter.com/2007/12/new-replies-settings.html
This can be thought of as 'discovery mode' (if you use it to follow new people), 'one-sided conversation mode' (if you find one-sided replies annoying), or 'promiscuous reply mode' (because I like saying 'promiscuous').
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:
http://blog.twitter.com/2008/05/how-replies-work-on-twitter-and-how.html
Note Evan Williams' comment on the settings at the time, which clearly required a lot of explanation:
"This is obviously too confusing. We want to make some changes to make it more clear. We could clarify the setting. But my preference is to take out the setting altogether and just make it work like the default. That way, it works the same for everyone. (If you have strong opinions on this, leave a comment.)"
It comes down to a config change that has apparently been on the minds of Twitter management for about a year, and has now been implemented. Clearly there are some users who were very attached to this feature and are frustrated that it has been removed; I would be happy to see Twitter put it back in as an 'Expert' setting to allow these users to get the functionality they want.
For the vast majority of Twitter users, losing the extra setting is a non-issue; the only-following choice has been the default setting for a long time. If the UI for promiscuous mode is confusing enough to cause problems for the majority of users, there ought to be room for Twitter to clean it up without the torches and pitchforks coming out.
So many people don't get twitter... I can finally understand why -- @twitter doesn't get twitter!!!
This requirement must have come from someone who wants to kill twitter.
I hope this is just a twitter bug which will go away soon.
@michael (can you see this? lol) that's a very helpful and insightful comment. thanks. will add link to it in post above.
I have been saying for a while now that the follow to follower ratio is upside-down for the potential thoughtleaders on Twitter.
@biz: 203 - 550,448
@cnnbrk: 6 - 1,447,150
@oprah: 11 - 975,813
@whitehouse: 64 - 71,750
@kingsthings: 53 - 260,319
@katiecouric: 76 - 22,983
etc. etc,. etc,
Has anyone considered the idea that the big wheels just don't have time for the noise. We are all noise to them. Power-useres have figured out a way to learn from the freely flowing information torrent but the Twitter swells can not be bothered with it.
As I read this change, now @cnnbrk only has to listen to 6 people and can megaphone out to a million and a half. @whitehouse, wouldn't you think it would be interesting to hear what the Twitter world is talking about? Larry, Katie, and Oprah just think it is something that they had to do so they wouldn't take the heat for being out of touch. @biz is either a one armed paper hanger or disengaged with Twitter and onto something else.
Me, I like to listen and learn through this conversation. How about you?
@Emily --
"The only set of tweets this would make sense for would be for users responding to people with protected updates, and ONLY then because it is irritating to click over to see the other side of the conversation and get shut down. Only then."
I follow over 1500 people, and it's hard enough keeping up with that. There is no way I can manage with promiscuous replies turned on (I've tried). I agree that you should have the option to see all replies, but there is a huge population of Twitter users (cf. Ev's 98% statistic) for whom this is the preferred mode and where promiscuous replies are not desirable.
@marshall -- Of course I see it! Unless... can Twitter filter out comment replies on RWW? Yikes, that's some serious mojo.
:-)
CitySpeek.com always shows your friends replies to others.
I haven't viewed "all @s" since I started following more than 100 people... BUT, is anyone really surprised that Twitter made a user-unfriendly change without checking with it's userbase to see if they really wanted it?
If Ashton Kutcher complains, maybe they'll switch it back. But I'm guessing it's unlikely.
I really don't like this change. As with many others, I've found a lot of new and interesting people by tracking down the other side of the half-conversations I saw on my Twitter feed.
Bad, Twitter! Bad!
RE: Michael's analysis
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.
@brickandclick
It sounds like Twitter may be grappling with their phenomenal growth over the past months...
Maybe this is a way to try to limit the load on their servers until they can get a stop-gap in place?
The real question then is... Is it better to User Fail or Fail Whale?
@michael Oh, don't get me wrong, there is a place for the ability to turn off @replies for people you don't follow, but it should remain an option to have those tweets turned on as well.
I have had them turned on from the get-go and I do keep my follow list pruned to less than 200 folks, but you know which ones I boot when it comes time to cull the herd a little? The ones that never @ people I don't know...because discovering new people that I don't already follow is a huge part of the value I get out of following anyone.
Honest answer: 99% of twitter users don't care about this setting.
I personally think it would be better to still leave the option, but give it a default of "only get replies of people you follow". This way, the average user won't bother changing the setting and most advanced users will understand what this is about.
Twitter is mainstream, they'll try to please the majority and make the platform as easy as possible to facilitate adoption.
Michael,
While I definitely appreciate your explanation (though I was aware of it already), I still totally think Twitter is in the wrong. I follow about 1,000 people, many of whom are genuine thoughtleaders; my "home" feed is currently inundated with furious tweets about this incident.
So yeah, perhaps the masses aren't peeved, but those of us who use Twitter for more than just chatting certainly are. An "expert" feature is necessary. I don't mind the idea of being able to turn this on/off, but give me the option!
-Jillian
I won't argue one bit that having all @ replies on was noisy, but yes, let us have the option to subject ourselves to said noise. An "Expert" or "Advanced" tab as Michael suggests with potentially confusing settings is ideal. I was following 1100+ with all @ replies on -- I like to live on the edge, I guess -- and my timeline seems really quiet to me now.
My biggest worry about this is the workaround: Tweets with characters right in front of the @ or mentioning folks mid-sentence break in-reply-to threading, making Twitter even less useful for conversation. So, yes, I'll be able to see the username one responds to once more, but there's a good chance there won't be any context, which is much, much worse.
In addition to the discovery of new people to follow, there is also for me this even more important benefit of "promiscuous mode":
I follow some smart people who engage in many conversations with many people. I do not want to follow all of their followers in order to benefit from the snippets of wisdom and excellent resources they provide via replies that I have been privy to thus far.
My hope is that Twitter power users (and everyone else) might consider changing their replies to mentions; that is, do not start replies with @username. If you like this suggestion, please share it via Twitter.
I agree with a version of what Ivy Clark says, Contestant No. 28 above: Let's kill Twitter and start over.
oh so disappointing. not only will i lose my bet but this will be horrible for the poker world.
not to mention amber alerts.
Is it just THAT hard to make something an option that can be a TOGGLE?
I mean carve out maybe 30 bucks out of the 55 million in VC money, add a checkbox in HTML. I think there's a tutorial or two out there.
Okay, I think this attacks and deletes on of the very features Twitter is all about. I personally have met alot of people this way...the majority as a matter of fact. It is the only way to find follows that have similar interests and you automatically have something in common "the common" friend. Who BTW, could be a better resource on who to follow than someone you are following? It is the ultimate hook up. The only people who this would benefit would be the mega stars who don't want to mess with the little guy..but wait I thought that was what set Twitter apart, the fact that that could happen even if the mega star does'nt want to follow the little guy you could still follow them and see what they are up too. Noise!!!!!! There is noise everywhere and should be in "Social Media"! Noise can spark creativity, add to conversations to complete an idea, cause someone to allow you into there world because they liked what u had to say. You just took all the possibility, opportunity ou of Twitter. That is what made it unique. What is the real agenda????
Twitter has made a huge mistake and the rate at which #fixreplies is trending, my guess is it won't be long before they resolve the issue.
As it was before, a Twitter user could choose which @replies appeared within their Twitterstream. What made Twitter believe they should make that decision for all their users and eliminate that control is beyond me. HUGE mistake. And right now, they're hearing about it from everyone...even at 1:24 am ET on a Wednesday morning.
Personally, I don't care about the 98% of Twitter users who allegedly don't care about missing 'promiscuous' replies (a word doused in awesomesauce, btw, Michael). I care about ME. And I want that feature back. I like making connections with 'promiscuous' people- that's how my world and mind expand.
True, another way to find these 'promiscuous' people is by reading the comments on articles like this (e.g. I'm now following @curthopkins because I liked his reply and his Twitter background), but it's not very scalable.
In an effort to work around Twitter's latest boner move, I will now preface reply Tweets with #bbp (Bring Back Promiscuity). http://tagal.us/tag/bbp (I see that someone has already defined #fixreplies, and I like it, but it's kinda long.)
Totally, totally agree -- this a shark-jumping moment for Twitter. And I saw this coming. And we have Steve Gillmor and Andrew Keen and Shel Israel and many other criticism-adverse and irritable A-listers to thank for this. You know why? Because they all block people from following them whom they don't like -- not spammers, not stalkers, but just people they don't like "talking back" at them. They block them so that they don't show up in those people's streams.
But that wasn't enough for them. They found that critics like me kept talking back anyway, regardless of whether they follow-blocked, because we could just look them up in search or see them chatting to other people who were not so thin-skinned as to block followers (truly a stupid thing to do *on the Internet* -- for a while the devs even made all such searches by blocked followers showed up as locked accounts, but then they realized that truly was wrong on the Internet, because you could just put the searches into an RSS feed and read them on Google. Sigh.)
But...these types HATED seeing all those @ replies in their own vanity searches, then showing up in the even more prominent @ column -- they hated it when people "butted in" to conversations they were having with other people (not just A-listers, a lot of thin-skinned, irritable and paranoid types who aren't A-listers hated it to). Some of them REALLY got into a frenzy about anybody even asking them a question or demanding some accountability from them as public figures (see @craignewmark for example).
So they whined and pleaded, and if they had the devs' ears, they asked them at lunch -- hey, shut that off so we can just talk to our friends, you know, like an adult AIM or Facebook. So nobody but our friends that we WANT following us can read our special feted conversations. So we can get rid of "trolls".
See what happens when you behave that way? You kill off the one feature that made Twitter worth all its inanity: serendipity and search for interesting relevant conversations.
So @ajkeen and @stevegillmor got what they wanted. And Twitter jumped the shark, for sure.
Resist, resist, and resist!
Personally, I don't care about the 98% of Twitter users who allegedly don't care about missing 'promiscuous' replies (a word doused in awesomesauce, btw, Michael). I care about ME. And I want that feature back. I like making connections with 'promiscuous' people- that's how my world and mind expand.
True, another way to find these 'promiscuous' people is by reading the comments on articles like this (e.g. I'm now following @curthopkins because I liked his reply and his Twitter background), but it's not very scalable.
In an effort to work around Twitter's latest boner move, I will now preface reply Tweets with #bbp (Bring Back Promiscuity). http://tagal.us/tag/bbp (I see that someone has already defined #fixreplies, and I like it, but it's kinda long.)
PS I'm already following the aforementioned Michael, but I met him the old fashioned way: at beer and blog.
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