Twitter Reverses Policy Change, For Now. This is Nuts But Here's How It Works (UPDATED: Only A Little Reversed)
Less than 24 hours after making a major change to the way that Twitter works, the company has reversed the change and thanked users for "helping us discover what's important!" The new new policy may be just as confusing as the old new policy, but we offer a chart below explaining just how this all works. (Update: See below, this may actually not be a substantive reversal.)
This is no small matter - this is a fast unfolding story about the technical and social texture of the real-time social graph. To read our original coverage of the issue, and why it's a big deal, see our post Twitter Puts a Muzzle on Your Friends: Goodbye People I Never Knew. For our speculation on the technical and social rational behind the change, see our post from this morning, Is This Why Twitter Changed Its Replies Policy? For a chart explaining it all with arrows and a picture of a drunk bird, see below.
From Biz Stone's most recent update to the Twitter blog:
"First, we're making a change such that any updates beginning with @username (that are not explicitly created by clicking on the reply icon) will be seen by everyone following that account. This will bring back some serendipity and discovery and we can do this very soon."
By that he means that you'll see the tweet if you were following the account that sent it, not that you're required to be following the account it was directed to. That's the difference between the original way Twitter has worked for years and yesterday's change. There's no mention that all but a small number of people have in recent months failed to opt-out of the relatively recent default of not seeing replies to strangers. Now apparently everyone's Twitter experience will reflect the way some early adopters preferred it. Except, for now, in cases where a message was originated from pushing a reply button. (That part deserves a #wtf?) Can we all please stop and breath for a minute? Update: Upon further reflection and conversation, we have to question just how much has been reversed. Presumably most replies are originated by pushing the reply button, so if those ones remain invisible - then most conversation between your friends and strangers will remain invisible to you. Problem unsolved! Add to that the fact that when you start a message in the web interface with an @username - the "post" button gets AJAX transformed into a "reply" button! The message you post does not appear to get marked up "in reply to" however. Oh, for the simpler days of being a Twitter user - like yesterday morning.
What does the future look like? (Who knows! Really!) Here's Stone again:
"Second, we've started designing a new feature which will give folks far more control over what they see from the accounts they follow. This will be a per-user setting and it will take a bit longer to put together but not too long and we're already working on it."
We look forward to seeing what Twitter can come up with. That sounds good though. Wow.
Update: It's a Twitter world so replies come fast and furious. Our take aways in the minutes after this announcement - great job being responsive Twitter, that replies button caveat sounds nasty and individual settings sounds great as long as one of those options is full access to my own social graph (like friends of friends). This aint Facebook we're talking about here. Viva Twitter! You can defeat the frienemy Kutcher hordes and find a way to scale awesomeness!
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That's even weirder. *shakes head*
Posted by: Kevin Kuphal
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May 13, 2009 1:57 PM
Per-user setting makes sense, but it will require time to set-up, unless it can be done somehow productively.
Nice to know they listened - thanks for the great post!
James Hofheins http://twitter.com/jwhof
Operation Kindness
http://jameshofheins.blogspot.com
All companies, not just tech/software, would do well to study, then adopt policies that allow them to respond to their users/customers this quickly.
I have a feeling that the past 24 hour "@ scandal" will become a chapter in future business school MBA course work.
So how is a tweet different if user A presses the Reply button. Does it show differently on the screen, in search or through the API?
I think Twitter just jumped the credibility shark w/this latest stunt.
You don't betray the user's trust by first citing them as the reason for feature removal ... when the truth was that it was always a scalability issue.
http://is.gd/zApz
Twitter has just introduced a new level of complication to this whole mess with the "type" vs "button press" thing. Now they're going to make folks who like the new setting mad because everyone who liked the old way is just going to type usernames as opposed to pressing the button.
So, according to Alex at Twitter, this is a setting 3% of the Twitter population used by default. Now it is a setting everyone uses by default (more or less). Potentially, that is a huge experience change, even in the short term.
It will be interesting to see if there's more hell to pay from the 97% who didn't know people they were following were that conversational. I hope that most replies are generated with the reply button (or equivalent, on third-party clients), rather than explicitly typing the username.
I'm looking forward to more controls later, definitely.
Interesting development. Thanks for explaining all these changes as they've happened.
can they just keep this basic? sigh...
So I can soon only see the replies from stupid Twitterers that DON'T GET THAT STUFF with the reply button. I HATE general replies like "@bestbuddy: Yeah, that story was wicked!" and when you click on the reply to find out what they are referring to, you just can't see shit because that person really thought you had to TYPE IN someone's name for replying to them. Man!
Way to go. I'm already throwing up. It supports people now that don't get basic replying.
I'm confused by the last part "I see the tweet as long as User A didn't originate it by pushing a "reply" button". Meaning you are using some type of client to reply rather then typing out @username? Does this only affect non SMS users (you type everything in SMS, no buttons are there).
Am I the only one that preferred the all or none option? I had all @replies turned on. Now there is just NO option, at least for the time being...you know, pending a new thing to manage on the individual level. (groups?) What a complete pain.
I loved it when Twitter was about simplicity. This I don't love.
hello,
I can soon only see the replies from stupid Twitterers that DON'T GET THAT STUFF with the reply button. I HATE general replies like "@bestbuddy: Yeah, that story was wicked!" and when you click on the reply to find out what they are referring to, you just can't see shit because that person really thought you had to TYPE IN someone's name for replying to them. Man!
======================
michel123
====================
adult- adult
@davidsanger, True @replies are linked in Twitter's data store to the message to which it's a reply. There is an API call that allows you to get replies to a particular message or to see if a message is in reply to another. So, what @biz is saying is that you can create a new message with @rww as the first few characters and everyone will see it. But, if you hit "Reply" to one of @rww's messages, it won't be seen by people not also following @rww. Make sense?
This doesn't make sense. For the past few months (if not a whole year?) the default setting has been that if user A tweets this message intended for user B, the only people who see it are the people who follow both:
@B you are cool
Now you're saying that as of today *everyone* following @A, but not necessarily @B, will see that message? I can't imagine Twitter reversing themselves to such an extreme, to now focus a setting used by a minority of users, which they tried to remove last night, onto ALL users. Just doesn't make sense.
I consider myself an "early adopter" of Twitter and I prefer to only see my friends' messages to other people I'm friends with. I also like to know that when I send something beginning with "@" it's not going to EVERYONE whose following me, just my friends who are also interested in "@B".
In response to #8 - @Kevin Makice
Let's not forget that in terms of Twitter, 3% equals at least 150,000 individual users.
Moreover, I'd like to know how many of that 97% make up the 60% of one-time 'Twitter quitters' who set up accounts and then quickly lose interest ...
... as it could me 3% is a larger % of the active users affected by said scalability issue (first reported as a UX complaint).
Hmm. Thanks for the roundup Marshall... only one key tidbit missing: both posts today from Twitter acknowledged what was NOT said yesterday -- in addition to the UX and functionality reasons for making the change, the promiscuous replies option did not scale and was not sustainable from an engineering standpoint.
Wonder why they didn't say that in the first place? :-) Is it better to have a slew of stories about Twitter not listening to users than a similar storm about Twitter not being ready for prime time?
--Michael @miketrose
I didn't opt out of the "new default" because I had already set it to show me all before the default changed. And I don't recall being told anything about that being changed in my settings without asking me, so I hope it wasn't. And then, of course, it was, when the option was taken away from me.
Another thing that's not clear here: will the replies I'm not allowed to see include those created via a reply button in a third-party client? That is, anything that shows "in reply to" in Tweetdeck, is gone now, unless I'm already following both parties?
So it's not fixed.
I have no objection to folks choosing to not see what they don't want to see. I want the same freedom of choice, that's all.
This sounds more complicated. I don't quite understand how an option they say is used by so few can bring down a communication network. Granted I'm not up on network operations but the fact that Twitter makes this sound like such a necessary, dire change when we never even knew there was a problem makes me suspicious. If transparency is the goal, Twitter is very opaque.
Posted by: Liz
|
May 13, 2009 2:21 PM
Type vs. Reply? What the hell is going on over there? Is Congress involved in this mess?
@ 12: Playing around with the Twitter API, you'll find that every status has an "in_reply_to" member. This in_reply_to can only be set by the web with the Reply button. It can be set by the API clients as well, if the API clients do it right. It can't be done by SMS.
So the long and short is if the in_reply_to is properly set (via reply button, for instance) then the rule will come into play.
As others have said, I A) really enjoyed being able to find new interesting people by checking people that folks I already follow were having conversations with. Therefore I had the @replies option turned on.
And, B) I use itweet.net/web exactly BECAUSE it includes a really useful threading function where you can click on "in reply to" and the first tweet opens right below the tweet of the person I'm following (not in a new window, as with Twitter's interface - which I *hate*) - and in fact you can keep clicking "in reply to" for the whole thread. So that's disabled with the new function.
Sigh.
My take on the practical implications of this policy change:
Before I send @MarshallK a tweet, I need to think hard whether I want people who don't follow @MarshallK yet to read my message to him or not. If I don't want them to see the reply, I click on the reply button. I retain the message threading that way because I'm creating an explicit relationship between two Twitter messages, but I sacrifice @MarshallK's desire to be discovered by my followers who don't follow him yet.
If I DO want people to be able to see a tweet sent to you, no-matter whether they're following you or not, I'd better just manually type @MarshallK as the first word in my Twitter text input box. That way I do distort the automatic message threading that would have been established because of the in_reply_to_status_id and in_reply_to fields that don't get populated using this method.
Phew.
As a programmer, I can think of a couple reasons why treating the reply button a bit differently is the simplest quick change they can make. I'm guessing too that the various Twitter clients will produce different results depending on how they use the API. Just a guess. It's easy to complain about Twitter, but I applaud their response. They're doing what they can. They make mistakes, but they're listening. Over time this'll get sorted out, just like their uptime has gotten better over time.
Can you please rephrase the sentence below, and explain the core point in a way that doesn't require people to diagram the sentence first?
"There's no mention that all but a small number of people have in recent months failed to opt-out of the relatively recent default of not seeing replies to strangers. "
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitter_reverses_policy_change_for_now_this_is_nut.php
Bizarre
Posted by: Nick Halstead
|
May 13, 2009 2:32 PM
so I take it the scalability issue has something to do with the actual clicking of the reply icon?
This is crap. @ replies generated by pressing the reply button are the ones that are actually useful because they maintain the conversational thread. This new new change isn't a satisfactory response to user complaints, it's patronization. Also, I fail to see how my freinds' @ replies are any different than all of their other tweets in terms of scalability. The best part about Twitter is the ability to choose who you want to hear. And if I want to hear what someone is saying, I want to hear everything they're saying.
They've completely lost the plot.
Posted by: Jamie
|
May 13, 2009 2:38 PM
Maybe twitter should spend less time courting Ashton Kutcher and more time listening the 40% of us that have stayed on twitter.
This isn't a reversal.
When you click reply it sets a in_reply_to_status_id field and many clients do this and we do this in friendbinder (http://friendbinder.com). It wasn't available in the early days of twitter and it has been around since August 12th 2008 (http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/browse_thread/thread/f009c76d17199084?pli=1). It seems that most replies that you would normally see will have this set.
Only a small number of extra messages that to someone but not a reply will now be shown that weren't before.
Seems to me this was all about Twitter not wanting to continue the "show conversation" feature because it presents scalability problems when trying to tether a lot of posts together for millions of people. But what do I know? I'm not programmer. I'll REALLY miss not being able to track back on conversations (I assume most in the know will skip using "reply" button now), but this latest fix is better than nothing.
@CarriBugbee
I don't see why on earth you are spinning Ev's action merely to nerf the @ in a different direction as a "reversal".
it's nothing of the kind.
If you don't follow someone, you won't see their @ to other people, which removes the serendipity.
If you are follow blocked, you can't see their tweets in your stream, but it also looks as if you will not be able to see their @ now in searching their name in search, which is the workaround.
That's deliberate.
There's now a serious hobble put in the search that you aren't noticing or writing about.
Before, if I wasn't following a person, but searched a key word and found them saying something interesting about a topic I was interested in, or in reply to someone else interesting, I could press on the arrow button and instantly reply to them.
Now I can't.
To reply to them, I have to press on the entire tweet, then get the arrow button *again*, then reply.
If they have follow-blocked me, I can't do that because I will get the message about locked tweets even if they are not locked in fact to the general public.
So I can manually type their name and still talk back to them -- a key function of social media simply MUST be the ability to talk back! -- but I'm not certain whether my @ goes into their reply tab or is visible any more because they aren't following me, and have follow-blocked me.
And that's what the thin-skinned A-listers who make liberal use of follow-black wanted - the ability to get followers and broadcast to those loyal followers, but prevent people they don't like from ever talking back to them by erasing what they say.
That's a terrible thing when replicated across an entire system that has come to be the chief form of democratic discourse in our society these days.
Marshall, this doesn't work effectively either. If I understand it there is nothing to stop an API developer from putting in an option in TweetDeck or another program to post @replies in the traditional way without hitting the reply key. That will annoy some users and not others. The control should always be with the receiver. That's one of the key advantages of Twitter. In my view "all@replies" (my default) wasn't well understood and yet we quickly learnt how to scan for connections and conversations that may be of value.
Separately, you really want to do the settings person by person? Try using it even for SMS messages on @replies. Once you get into the 100's even finding and managing becomes a problem. I can't imagine trying to set it up to work one by one.
One element that would help discovery is to get feedback on conversations that friends are participating in. Eg #fixreplies Right now where those are @replies you would no longer see them. For the most part those #hashtags are more interesting to me than the #twittersearch one.
Lastly, having created Phweet http://phweet.com where part of the execution was the power of voice conversations that could propagate through the network and rapidly escalate to conference calls... Who's talking to who goes out the window based on the way Twitter is developing their strategy. To my knowledge they never talked to developers.
Biz-arre indeed... I'm assuming that yesterday's policy change was in an effort to minimize phishing? Which is to protect @B's right? But the solution's pretty weird. @A now has more control over @B's visibility. Ok. But there are now two kinds of reply? A genuine reply (reply button) and a "public" reply? User confusion notwithstanding, this'll really mess w/ third party threading and network analytics apps.
This is quite funny, if you think of it. First they "fixed" something that didn't seem to need to be fixed. Then they decided to fix the fix by making it just even more confusing. Great work! There's nothing else to do than to laugh.
Where's the fail whale when it's needed?
@Stuart when you said
"If I understand it there is nothing to stop an API developer from putting in an option in TweetDeck or another program to post @replies in the traditional way without hitting the reply key."
Actually before August 12th (and probably for some time after) all clients did that. We and other client developers went out of our way to implement in_reply_to_status_id:
http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/browse_thread/thread/f009c76d17199084?pli=1
So, basically what this means is that we can kind of control what our followers see.
If it's an @reply that really wouldn't be of interest outside of a circle of friends (I dunno what off the top of my head, but they must exist) then I use the Reply button and only followeres following followers can see it?
And if I start a new tweet with an @name, then it goes out as a public tweet and everyone who follows me sees it?
they did nothing of substance. since everyone uses the reply button (and assuming the twitter clients set in_reply_to properly), the same tweets that were being blocked earlier are still blocked -- how many of you will type out @ and the name of the person? none. twitter mgmt just wants to know how stupid we are - whether a little verbal leger-de-main (leger-de-tongue?) will fool people into thinking that they changed anything meaningful.
zOMFG! This is even worse...A *real* improvement would make it easier to track conversations by adding the ability to link to more than one reply. For instance, if I'm replying to two people who have said a similar thing, it would be great if the "in reply to" link could trace back to both. Instead, everyone will now stop clicking the reply button...effectively eliminating the fragile and limited threading Twitter has. So instead of seeing an interesting, but oblique reply that I can follow to it's origin, I just get random idiotic @replies that mean nothing. WTF? This is WORSE. Now I won't even be able to follow threads by people I *do* follow. #ANNOYING #fixreplies
Marshall
Are you sure this is only the future being figured out and not insanity? Or perhaps they're the same thing.
Thanks for keeping us up-to-date!
@pdxwatch
This isn't a reversal, saying so gives Twitter far too much credit. @replies are still gone if you actually REPLY to a tweet, so things are still broken in all cases where people are actually using Twitter properly.
The thing is, it really is a blunder on their part. They have a part in their api which is called "in_reply_to_status_id" which is set to what ever tweet you wish to reply to. Instead of going all out and removing any tweet beginning with an @reply, they should have filtered it based on "in_reply_to_status_id" as this is much easier (a binary check to see if "in_reply_to_status_id" is null or not) than a string search for an @reply and then a search to determine if they are following that user.
Ridiculous.
Ugh, this is "listening"? Just put it back the way it was! You had it that way fine until today, what's the big deal?
And which is it, Twitter? You can't scale or you just want to make things simpler? I don't know about you, but I'm losing trust either way just because they're contradicting themselves.
Everyone please sign my #fixreplies petition here and RT to send a strong, unified message:
http://bit.ly/fixtwitter
So, after 18 hours of chaos, the takeaway is not to ever use the "reply" button, right?
I hope the Twitter VIPs will actually read today's blogs, comments & Tweets about this issue. But I fear they won't bother.
It must be time for lunch because my head is spinning after that article.
Glad to see that Twitter is being mindful of its users.
Thanks for the post!
t ~pooptheworld.com
The whole notion of having to read replies of people I don't follow and don't care about is obnoxious. So I actually LIKED the changed, pre-revised policy.
Totally agree with Alita that this "fix" is much worse. Seems like they were focusing on the comments about serendipity and totally glossing over the fact that this absolutely ruins the conversational threading that has evolved.
When Ev queried the community a year ago, the feedback was exactly the same -- don't do it. I understand it must be a scalability issue, but this is not the fix. Addressing scalability is the fix!
Even old school early adopters often don't understand how replies work, so I understand their frustration. Here's hoping they can figure out a simple way to explain it and bring back the option for those of us who like the noise.
Also, that 3% figure is totally bogus since (as you mentioned in the post) they've totally architected the system away from the option. The default on new accounts has been, for some time, to only see chatter between people you're following. I hate that they're saying "97% of our users won't notice a thing" -- they've stacked the deck.
Not sure why people are calling this a case study in listening to your audience. Twitter is reacting to the public outcry, but not exactly by fixing the issue, and they certainly could have asked some of their users what kind of impact the change would make in the first place.
All in all, this was not well handled.
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