The users of the immensely popular micro blogging website, twitter had an unpleasant last week. As if the regular tweeters were not frustrated enough with the frequent encounters with the “fail-whale” and delay in getting tweets, they were surprised by a “small setting update” that was done to their account settings which affected the way they will see “@replies” in their twitter time lines.

According to twitter

……we’ve learned most people want to see when someone they follow replies to another person they follow—it’s a good way to stay in the loop. However, receiving one-sided fragments via replies sent to folks you don’t follow in your time line is undesirable. Today’s update removes this undesirable and confusing option.

So according to the new settings, if you are following “X” and “X” tweets, “@Y……………”, and you do not follow “Y”, then you will not be able to see this tweet in your time line! (even though you are following the person who tweeted it). In simpler words, you won’t see tweets beginning with “@username” in your time line if you dont follow that user.

Take this for example:

If you are following me (@knayam), but not following @ShashiTharoor, you wont be able to see my above tweet in your time line!

Earlier, this setting was optional where users could select if they want to see “@replies” of only users they follow or for any user. Twitter has now disabled this functionality.

This effectively takes away one of the best part of twitter, serendipitous user discovery. Earlier if I saw one of the persons im following discussing an issue I am interested in with a third person, I could have sneaked in, and followed that third person if I found him/her/(it) interesting. But now, that is not possible as I will never come to know about conversations between people I follow and “X” as I dont follow “X”! This kills the “social” aspect of twitter as you can only stay in touch with people you already know as twitter has a system in place which drastically lowers your chances of you meeting an interesting new person in the twitter community.

Naturally, twitter users came all guns blazing against this stupid change, and within a few minutes, “#fixreplies” (the hashtag used for expressing dissent and urging twitter to undo the changes) was trending number one on twitter trend list.
Twitter team immediately got into action by seeing enormous feedback they got on their “small change”. Twitter’s CEO @ev tweeted shortly in response to the #fixreplies messages:

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

Later another blog post came from twitter explaining the reasons that forced them to make this change. They said they have learnt a lot from the feedback they got from the users:

Folks loved this feature because it allowed them to discover new people and participate serendipitously in various conversations. The problem with the setting was that it didn’t scale and even if we rebuilt it, the feature was blunt. It was confusing and caused a sense of inconsistency. We felt we could do much better.

So here’s what we’re planning to do. 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.

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.

Later, in yet another blog post, twitter admitted that they “screwed up” from communication point of view. They also said that product design and technical issues were the two resons for taking this feature down. The change also affected only 3% of the twitter users (true as about 60% of twitter users leave after a month, via Nielsen).

The problems which led to disabling the feature:

Product Design Flaws

Since last year we’ve been hearing from users and having discussions about removing this setting—feedback indicated that it was useful but also created confusion. People would change the setting and then not understand why their timeline had fragments of conversations. From the tweet author perspective, there was an unclear expectation as to who would actually see messages which often lead to trepidation when it came to using replies. Finally, even folks who understood the setting would complain that they couldn’t follow accounts with a high volume of replies because the replies overwhelmed their timeline. It was becoming apparent that we had an opportunity for improvement.

Technical Problems

Even though only 3% of all Twitter accounts ever changed this setting away from the default, it was causing a strain and impacting other parts of the system. Every time someone wrote a reply Twitter had to check and see what each of their followers’ reply setting was and then manifest that tweet accordingly in their timeline—this was the most expensive work the database was doing and it was causing other features to degrade which lead to SMS delays, inconsistencies in following, fluctuations in direct message counts, and more. Ideally, we would redesign and rebuild this feature but there was no time, hence the sudden deploy.

Hopefully, this clears things up a bit and I promise to be less distracted and hasty when it comes to blog posts. We’re still listening, reading tweets, gathering feedback, and working on more efficient ways of doing so. Thanks to everyone for the feedback and for using Twitter.

So as it appears, twitter does not care about the user base albeit a meager 3%, which is actually seriously using twitter and is making changes trying to reduce the bounce rate. While it is understandable, I find it hard to believe why they would  kill an element as important as this, it really kills the “conversations”, the fun part of twitter. As I see it, new users will not see any great thing about twitter if they cant participate in conversations and meet new people, and will end up leaving twitter anyway.

Twitter has made it clear that the feature will not be turned on in its current form.

So here’s what we’re planning to do. 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.

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.

I am one of those 3% who LOVED this feature. As a result of this change, my time line is dead as compared to earlier as I dont receive all the tweets of the people I follow. I wish twitter gives us this feature back or at least in some good form like they have promised. I am very hopeful of this as it is evident from the series of blog post and tweets the twitter team wrote addressing the feedback on this issue that they do care about their users. (ignoring users who were able to get “#fixreplies” on twitter’s trending list within hours of the outbreak and maintained it at that position for about two days, is anyway not a good idea, however “small” (in this case just a miniscule 3%) that user base is! LOL)

For the time being, if you want to make sure all your tweets reaches to all your followers, just dont use the “@reply” button to reply. rather use “@username” to whom you want to reply. Tweets typed without specifically using the “@reply” button will be visible to all your followers.