The day the conversation ended
As if you hadn’t heard already, Twitter has made a spectacular feature change that has angered many, caused indifference in others but not really pleased anyone. You can no longer see replies to people you don’t follow. Which, of course, is difficult because you don’t even know they exist in the first place. So if you follow me and I tweet @stephenfry saying he’s brilliant but you don’t follow Stephen Fry, you won’t see my Tweet and won’t know Stephen Fry is brilliant. Whatever, you get the idea.
I’m quite upset about this feature change. I love going through my timeline and picking up on conversations, reading the whole conversation and even following the other person if I find them interesting. With this reply curtain I can no longer follow debates, conversations, see interesting links, tips, answers to questions, polls and so on. This is a massive part of the reason I use Twitter – to meet new people and learn new things, and it seems a lot of people agree.
I can appreciate that if you follow a lot of people, or follow noisy people, this feature might be relieving but (apparently) there used to be a setting that allowed you to switch the feature on or off. It is now defaulted to off, which is taking away our choice to decide whether or not to view @’s to people we don’t follow. I have, on very rare occasions, unfollowed people who were filling my timeline with noisy crap (if you post a rubbish quote by some random historian or political figure every 10 seconds, I will unfollow you). That was my choice. The cost of losing this one timeline greatly outweighed the cost of losing the many interesting @’s to people I don’t know.
It might be nice to have an additional feature which rates the importance of each person you follow, kind of like Facebook’s “hide this person” in the timeline. If someone is too noisy, I could tell Twitter to tone down the number of Tweets I get from that person.
If you want to send @’s but don’t want everyone else reading them, that’s the point of the DM’s. Or e-mail. Or a phonecall. Maybe a text message or a private message in a forum or even a carrier pigeon. If you don’t want your conversation to be public, don’t put it in public.
The reply will only be hidden if you start your Tweet with their name, so please don’t or people like me may not be able to follow the conversation. I’m starting my replies with #fixreplies, one of the trending topics at the moment. #twitterfail seems to be doing nicely, too.
So Twitter: This party is a bit quiet, can you bring all the guests back please? I want to eavesdrop those who are happy to bring their conversations to the party, learn something new and even make new friends. Like I used to be able to. Thanks.
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