Twitter: What’s This Whole #fixreplies Thing About Anyway?

You may have seen this hash tag rear its ugly head in the last couple of days but not really understood exactly what the problem is. So I'm going to try to explain it here. But, like most things Twitter, the situation is constantly evolving (mostly badly) so this post may very well be obsolete by tomorrow.

In one of my early Twitter how-to posts, I'm On Twitter! (Now What?), I explained some of the various settings available to users of the service. When I got to the Notices tab, I wrote this:

The one thing that's a bit confusing about the Notices tab is the @Replies dropdown box. I'm going to talk a bit more about @Replies in a later post but, for now, I suggest you select "@replies to the people I'm following". This means you'll see tweets that are replies to ones you write, as well as those between others as long as you follow both of them. If you select "all @ replies", you'll see a lot more tweets involving people you're not following, and that can be a bit intimidating when you first start on Twitter.

I would still recommend this to new users, especially those who find Twitter overwhelming at the beginning. However, that recommendation is now moot, because Twitter has eliminated the option, which is what has a lot of people up in arms.

In the old system, if you picked "@ replies to the people I'm following," you would see tweets between two people in your timeline if you were following both parties. For example, if you followed both Kirk and Spock and Kirk sent an @reply to Spock, you would see that tweet. If you followed Kirk, but DIDN'T follow Spock, you wouldn't see it. The theory behind this option was that, if you're not following Spock, you may not be interested in his "private" conversations. (I say "private" because @replies set up a sort of conversation between two people, but that conversation is actually going on in the public Twitter environment.)

This was the default option (although I'm not sure it always was) and I recommended it to new Twitter users because it obviously filtered out a lot of tweets so people could gradually get used to the service without being bombarded with so many messages.

There was also an option to never see any @replies but that was kind of dumb because you wouldn't even see ones directed at you, so I don't think losing that feature is really a problem for most people.

What IS a problem is that they took away the "all @ replies" option, which allowed you to see all @replies written by the people you follow. So, per the earlier example, I would see all of Kirk's tweets directed at Spock, even if I didn't follow Spock.

There are several reasons why this has p***ed off people, not the least of which is that users generally don't like to have features taken away from them. Another reason is that a lot of people found the All option a great way to find NEW people to follow. Assuming I'm following Kirk because I'm interested in what he has to say, it would certainly make sense that the people he's "chatting" with might be saying stuff I'm interested in as well. Considering one of the main purposes of Twitter is to create an open community where you can engage with all sorts of people you might not otherwise, it seems beyond stupid that they would remove a key feature that helped achieve this goal. (Kind of like when they removed the Everyone link in the right-hand panel. But I digress...)

The other reason people are annoyed is because of the reason the Twitter folks gave on their blog yesterday for making this change. Turns out, they thought it was too confusing for new users, and since not many people chose this option anyway, they figured it would be helpful to turn it off altogether.

Well, the flaws in this logic are pretty huge. First of all, it was confusing—but mostly because they didn't explain it very well. Second, this wasn't the default option, so the only people using it were those who actively CHOSE to use it, so it seems logical to assume these people weren't confused by it at all. And, the people using it were most likely those most engaged with the Twitter concept in general and probably some of its biggest advocates, so ticking them off probably wasn't the smartest idea in the world. I think TechCrunch summed it up nicely:

Gee, thanks Twitter. I didn’t realize that an option I manually activated was undesirable. Any other things I shouldn’t like that you’d like to make me aware of?

But the drama doesn't end there. After getting hit with a flood of complaints, this morning Twitter came up with a totally different reason for why they made the change—technical issues. Of course, they didn't explain in even the highest terms what the problem was and most of the comments I read after that announcement were along the lines of "I call bulls**t!

Since then, Twitter has announced a "fix" to the problem, which is (of course) far more complicated and non-user-friendly than the original scenario. I'm not even going to describe it here because I'm quite certain it will change again within the next couple of days. (If you're interested, you can read about it on TechCrunch as well.

Now, I have no idea what the original reason was for making this change but I'm not quite sure why anyone was surprised by it. This is the same company that took three years to add a search box to their pages, refuses to add an automatic retweet function despite a huge demand for one, and that thinks a cute picture of a whale is an adequate response to their service going down multiple times a day. Clearly usability is not a high priority for them.

If you have any further questions about this situation, feel free to send them along and I'll do my best to make as much sense of this mess as possible.

Did this post help you? Share it with others!