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Comment by FiloSottile | Hacker News Reader

> New Tweets that begin with a username will reach all your followers. (That means you’ll no longer have to use the ”.@” convention, which people currently use to broadcast Tweets broadly.) If you want a reply to be seen by all your followers, you will be able to Retweet it to signal that you intend for it to be viewed more broadly.

This is terrible. They are introducing a way to broadcast mentions without using .@, which is great. So why also making non-reply mentions forcefully broadcasted, with no way to hide them!?

I don't want my @ThreeUKSupport tweets to go to all my followers.

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I don't understand why Twitter never implemented some sort of categorization feature. There are many individuals that I'd follow if I could just get a subset of their tweets in my feed.

For example, I might want to follow scientists' tweets on science, but not their political or favourite sport team tweets. Right now it's either all or nothing, but why can't people categorize their tweets so only people interested in them see them? This would be better for both parties.

This is why I can't bear to open the Twitter app. I signed up, and followed a few of the emergency agencies in SF, hoping to catch tweets about fires, accidents, etc. But these numbskulls keep blabbing away about awards, charity events, dinners, promotions, etc. etc. that it's basically useless. So I uninstalled the app a few days later.

This is why I left Twitter after whole 3 days AFAIR. I followed several tech people, and the amount of content produced was just too much, particularly since 2/3 of it was random noise.

I'm missing out on some interesting discussions for sure, but I'd have to be on Twitter half a day each day to scroll through all this stuff.

Same goes for Facebook. They surely have the ability to discern political posts from non-political ones, but the only control over what appears on our news feeds is follow/unfollow.

"Hide all from ..." is the single best Facebook feature. I use it a lot, I think I have most political sites hidden now.

Facebook feed does that for you.

Yes. You must have faith in the algorithm. Do not question its results.

This is possible (in reverse) with lists. I don't follow anyone on Twitter, but I have a dozen or so lists for friends, news, etc.

I think that's one of those ideas that sounds nice, but is just too complex for most tweet authors to use reliably.

Allow users to tag a set of hashtags as a category. Make hashtags user-taggable and suddenly sorting and categorizing is easy.

Undoubtedly this just sounds like a good idea to the "few orthogonal abstractions" hacker brain, but with the right UI it could work.

You would still need people to use these hashtags reliably. I don't think I would do it, and I suspect few people would.

Hah, we are doing this as a final project in a data science course I'm enrolled at. Not sure if we'll reach this goal, since there are a lot of interesting pieces before and time for it is really short.

I think twitter has made it a point to paint themselves into the corner:-)

Pretty much the equivalent of being cc'ed whenever someone emails a email address. There's a reason I filter out .@ in Tweetbot. I don't want to see all the "open complaining" like people looking to shame company X for wronging them somehow.

This is badly phrased but it's for New Tweets only.

Some (most?) of his @ThreeUKSupport tweets are New Tweets and he doesn't want these going to his followers.

Dumb workaround, but you could just pick a random tweet from @ThreeUKSupport and reply to it to initiate the conversation.

Or @ThreeUKSupport could enable private messages (Direct Messages).

Or email support.

Email support for most companies is awful. I've always had better response from Twitter; perhaps because it's all out in the open.

Actually companies make it hard on purpose to find an email address or contact form, because support is expensive. It's a well known trick to burry that deep within some bullshit interface with answers to questions you don't care about. I always find the "Was this helpful?" questions frustrating on support pages, because they don't have a "No, I want to freaking talk to somebody" button.

And the mobile interface only has a New Tweet button; nothing for individual accounts.

Yeah, this is problematic. I had the same concern (once I wrapped my brain around the behavioral distinction between replies and new tweets).

I suppose this will force more use of DMs for interactions with businesses.

Then just reply to any random tweet on their timeline.

Also known as "the worst conversation UX since the abolishment of clay tablets".

Which incentivizes the ruining of conversation threads with unrelated/irrelevant tweets.

People accidentally do that all the time, and it's terrible when you're trying to read relevant replies.

That's probably going to break all sorts of these customer service integration tools.

Frankly things have gotten weird every since the focus shifted from SMS (where the @ and .@ thing started) to their app and website.

SMS was an after thought long before .@ started. Tweets starting with @ weren't treated specially, and replies weren't yet a thing. Then Twitter started hiding tweets that started with @ and there was a good amount of backlash from people complaining that this would reduce their ability to discover other interesting accounts by seeing who the people they follow interact with. Twitter however stuck with it and then the .@ convention started as a workaround. Now they are just going back to that original behavior except replies are an actual thing now so they can differentiate tweets that simply start with a @ from those that are actual replies, which couldn't be done when this change was first introduced.

Yet when they implemented the "retweet with a comment" system (embedding one tweet within another, accessed via the retweet button) they didn't think far enough ahead to avoid breaking their reply tracking. This because people have taken to using said system to respond to tweets.

Honest question: shouldn't you send a DM or an email to @ThreeUKSupport instead of starting a public discussion with them?

You would perhaps be dismayed to learn that some organizations only offer decent support via Twitter. Presumably because it's a public venue.

Unfortunately it seems to be becoming more and more common for companies to only care about customer service if you message them publicly

Did something change or can you DM anyone now? Last I remember, you had to either be following each other or the recipient had to opt-in to anyone being able to DM them. It may have changed recently (my Twitter usage has definitely dropped off a cliff in the last year or so, so I may have missed it)

The receiver has to switch on the "anyone can DM me" option.

Likely added in response to many service providers using twitter as a support channel.

This worked like that years ago. Horrible decision to undo that "fix".

That fix was intended to hide replies before replies were a first class citizen. At that time there was no easy way to distinguish between a reply and a tweet that simply started with a @. Now that replies are first class citizens they can revisit this "fix". And plenty of people didn't like this fix when it was first introduced, that's why .@ started as a convention after it.

That fix was not a quick hack, it was a full-fledged feature that has been there since... 2009?

Everything old is new again...

http://techcrunch.com/2009/05/12/twitter-decides-were-not-sm...

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