How Twitter broke Twitter | Hacker News Reader

How Twitter broke Twitter

theincidentaleconomist.com

87 pointsgronkie35 comments

It'd be great if .@ would still count as a reply (i.e. that tweet would still contain a pointer to the tweet it's replying to) but be visible by everyone. It's the best of both worlds.

Also I wonder what happens if you hit Reply, but then delete or modify the @username. Is it still counted as a reply to that person's tweet, and therefore only visible to the intersection of your followers?

EDIT: s/union/intersection

I think that hitting "reply" should still contain a pointer even if you don't include the @username. Doesn't the threaded-reply already imply that you're addressing that person?

I think that would require a tweak to the UI to make it more obvious that a tweet is a reply. There's already some subtle stuff there (small-font "in reply to" and I think a little curved arrow), but the most obvious part that the content starts with "@".

...and therefore only visible to the union of your followers?

You meant intersection of your followers.

I just did some testing on Twitter for Mac:

* Having the @username anywhere in the tweet preserves the pointer.

* Deleting the username clears out the pointer.

* Deleting the username, and retyping it (at the end of the tweet) restores the pointer.

The last scenario makes me think that the validation is server side. It seems that Twitter ensures that the tweet still mentions the author of the replied-to tweet or it will clear out the pointer.

Replies are triggered by two factors. An `in_reply_to_status_id` field that is filled in behind the scenes and an @mention of the original author in the text.

I apologize if this is off topic, but from the other comments it seems that everyone here was aware of this .@ command (something I'd never heard of before). Is there some kind of list where all these special commands may be found?

It's not really a command, just convention. If my tweet begins with @Permit, then it's only visible to the intersection of your and my followers, so somebody that follows me but not you would not see it. But if I start it with anything else (people have just adapted . as a convention, but it could be anything) then it's visible to ALL of my followers. Except, as this article explains, if I used the formal Reply button on one of your tweets.

EDIT: s/union/intersection

I don't use Twitter, but it sounds like you're describing the intersection, not the union. </pedantry>

Corrected, thanks.

Oh I see, that makes perfect sense actually. Thanks you.

I guess there's value in explicitly calling out to your followers that you're broadcasting your reply with the ".@" but I find it horrendously ugly, even in the Twitter world where tweets like @bob RT @Mary #FF @Ryan @Greg #ThePiManCometh t.co/Nf8QZ are commonplace and obviously ugly, I find them less so than .@ —My preferred way to broadcast a reply to all is either with a leading space (if that even works anymore) or to use as much English as possible (Well, @Bingo I think we have a #Nameo problem). But that could just be me being a terrible Twitter user (you'll see on my feed that I tend to prune my own tweets down to exactly 140 characters and try to avoid abbreviations, acronyms, etc., though I retweet many other tweets). I also rarely broadcast replies because I figure that nobody cares unless they already follow both of us in the conversation, and also because I have my website configured to display recent tweets that aren't @ replies, so I have better control over what's showing on my blog sidebar (without limiting my ability to @reply).

Well sometimes the leading . is useful to you're replying to something.

An arguably better convention is simply to @ the person you're replying to at the end of the tweet. If it's a tweet worth broadcasting, it may as well read like an ordinary tweet.

Again, you mean the intersection of your and my followers.

Ah crap. Fixed.

I'm confused. I'm looking around at a few accounts and I see a LOT of them starting with @whatever where I do not follow the other person. Is this a setting somewhere? Did I completely misunderstand? And they show up whether or not I am logged in, whether or not I am following the person using @whatever.

Are you sure this tweet-hiding applies when not using the Reply button?

If you look directly at someones profile you will see all of their tweets regardless of who they are too. The reply behavior only applies to the tweets you see in your home timeline.

Oh. Thank you.

Yeah, what abraham said. Sorry, that could've been clearer.

most of twitter's userbase is also confused

Twitter's reply/reply-all logic is that if an @username is the first word of a tweet, it's considered to be a direct reply to only them (and thus is only shown to people following both of you). This makes sense, since a tweet that otherwise includes a username (say, "At the beach with @so-and-so!") is clearly not supposed to be a reply.

Adding a single character before the username is just a lazy way to throw off the 'first word as username = direct reply' check; using a period instead of any other symbol is more convention than a specific 'special command'.

i'm actually happy about this. i hate when my twitter stream gets flooded with people who use ".@" when replying to someone else. no offense to those people, but i generally don't care about your out of context reply that much.

I get that, but what if there's a discussion you would care about, but they used .@ so you can't follow the thread without scanning and trying to match up timestamps? I'd rather err on the side of allowing tweeters to do something potentially annoying than preventing them from doing something useful.

In my experience, the respectful way to do this is to draft a public tweet that makes sense out of context and (cc @whoever) at the end.

I think the point is that it isn't usually a reply. ".@SomeUser just totally nailed the presentation!" for tedious example. It's just tweeting a sentence that starts with someone's name.

Yes, but if you write that out, it will show up, because it's not a reply. It's only when you hit "reply" and post something that isn't really a reply that the behaviour breaks down.

Probably half the people I follow on Twitter are folks I found via replies my friends were making that I wouldn't see with the current way of things.

I've followed a lot fewer people since the change hiding @replies to people I don't also follow was made, and that rather bums me out.

"Is your face starting to twitch yet?"

I'm a Twitter user, and I can guarantee that my face is not starting to twitch. Not from this news, at least, possibly from the coffee.

I see what he's getting at but I don't honestly think this warrants the sensational tone...

This is disappointing. Twitter is great because it is so simple; they should pick the simplest behavior for any user action and stick with it so users can be fully aware of what every action does.

I agree. The real problem has nothing to do with tweets, it is about non-obvious, non-intuitive, obscure functionality with no clear way to learn.

The real problem with Twitter and why it has only caught on to a smaller subset of the population than Facebook is that its interface and usage are not intuitive enough. This example is case-in-point.

I'm pretty sure it's been this way for quite some time now...

i remember it was a pretty big topic after twitter changed (hijacked) the RT convention. there was an outcry because twitter justified it at first with "UX streamlining", but as a matter of fact it was a scalability issue. (or maybe i'm mixing up two different controversial decisions by twitter into one...)

... but everyone got used to it and the .@ convention was adopted pretty fast.

update: this is the "usability feature" http://blog.twitter.com/2009/05/small-settings-update.html

this is the truth http://blog.twitter.com/2009/05/replies-kerfuffle.html

this is the actual hijacking http://blog.twitter.com/2009/03/replies-are-now-mentions.htm...

I do hope Twitter clarify this with a blog post, that's the kind of community responsiveness the management would have shown a few years back.

7 Comments and no one with anything interesting to say. Sad times at Hacker News.

Fan out of messages is one of Twitter's greatest challenges. When looking at the compromise one has to make with the CAP theorem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_theorem ), Twitter previously chose to jettison Availability, hence the fame and recognition that the Fail Whale received.

They have since decided that Availability was more important to them than Consistency.

I had simply attributed the inconsistency in the messages I'd received and the conversations I'd missed to the number of followers/follows I'd grown to, but I guess I'm not surprised to see that this is a broader issue.

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