Twitter's "Small Settings Update" Is Anything But | Hacker News Reader

Twitter's "Small Settings Update" Is Anything But

kevinwilliampang.com

16 pointskpanghmc16 comments

This is not entirely stupid. My biggest pet peeve is people who carry on what should be IM conversations on twitter. Eg @jack are you read yet?. @jill No doing hair. @jack hurry up!. @jill shut up! etc. Most such conversational tweets begin with @user.

People will adapt to this. If you want your followers to discover someone you are tweeting, just don't start the tweet with @user. @user is for conversations. That way both conversations and recreational tweet reading can stay alive. It makes sense to me.

This only affects you if you only follow jack XOR jill. So, if you like them both, you're still going to be annoyed.

Sure, but this is still an improvement over the previous situation, for me anyway.

Why follow people who use Twiter as IM anyway? One of the great things about Twitter is that people don't get too offended when you unfollow.

I think people will adapt to this however, though there may be a different style of replying to people to get around the changes (e.g. "To @jack: Are you ready")

Why would they want to get around it so that everyone sees "To @jack: Are you ready". Why would anyone else care about that message.

I really don't understand twitter usage one bit. This update seems sane. Now if they can hide all the noisy useless banal tweets from me....

I've always had this option switched off as I found the noise was too much (and I only follow 240 people). With all @ replies turned on you only get half the conversation when you're not following the third person.

I found the best way to find new people to follow is to visit the profile pages of people I find interesting and see who they are conversing with. This way my twitter stream is not filled with @replies that are less relevant to me.

This is exactly what I do, and IMO if you're following a decent number of people it's the only viable solution. It drove me nuts when I briefly turned on the option to see @replies to people I didn't follow. You perpetually see half of a conversation and it makes little sense out of context.

Another solution is to use a Twitter client that lets you easily view entire conversations.

I'm very upset with Twitter staff about this change. They hurry up to update the original post, even deleted some sentences, but still.

I've discovered almost 80% of my following list via replies to people i didn't follow from people I already followed

People are using this hashtags to tweet and complain about this: #fixreplies, #openreplies & #replygate

I like it. I hated it at first, but then I looked at my feed. I could actually find things that were interesting in less than 15 minutes (and I'm only following 80 people). Sure this was an option before, but my inclination to drink from the fire-hose was so great that I never even thought of turning it off.

The OP's "hack" is a good one and I hope it catches on. Let's not forget that "@", "RT", "OH", hash-tags and all of those other twitterisms are emergent developments. "!" could be next (although I'd suggest "¡" for those of us with international keyboards :).

There's also a nice concept of loudness. I can now whisper inconsequential nothings to a group of my friends or broadcast from the rooftops.

I think they've taken away one of their best features. This goes to show that very often people and organizations do not understand what makes their product great, something budding startup starters on HN would be wise to consider. One must be mindful of even (or maybe especially) the small things that give your product heart.

From the Twitter user standpoint, I think the change is +-0 (no noise I'm not interested in is down, but potentially interesting conversations/information by my friends is not easily discoverable any more).

From API standpoint, this will force API users that relied on friends_timeline call to return all updates (to, e.g. back them up, or forward somewhere) to manually request timeline for each friend, so they turned the operation from O(1) into O(N) calls, which, considering the rate limiting, is not insignificant.

Make it an option.

I agree, but there has been a trend that options only serve to confuse users, which is the cause of much of the current Gnome, IMO, idiocy concerning UI customization.

It was an option. They took it away.

"We'll be introducing better ways to discover and follow interesting accounts as we release more features in this space." Twitter Pro, $4.95/mo -- "See More™"?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com