Epilogue: Let My Tweeple Go
By now the issue and firestorm surrounding the Twitter @ replies change is firmly chiseled into every twits collective consciousness. The hashtag #fixreplies was elevated by users to the pantheon of greatness for social media power.
The issue was never about the change, it was how it was handled. What made matters worse was the sugar coating used as the explanation. Not only was this bad sales job rejected by everyone but worse, we were insulted.
The appropriate action was just to level with us. This was the point made in the previous post on VitreousHumor, Let My Tweeple Go, and its subsequent updates. Today on the official Twitter blog, Biz Stone has done just that.
As was stated in the previous post on VitreousHumor, the explanation given for eliminating the so called “fragmented conversations” was just not credible. It just did not make sense that Twitter knew better than the twits how people like to use the service. The reality had to be a technical limitation that was being sold to us as friendly assistance. The following excerpt from Biz Stone’s blog post finally admits just that.
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.
The full text of the post can be found here.
To Biz, Evan and everyone else there at Twitter, all we can say is thank you for listening. Please take this lesson to heart and make it how you communicate with us in the future. It will only make you legendary, you’ll see.
To every company in the world, we hope you are paying attention.
