@toddprouty

Did Twitter ignore user feedback?

[This won’t make much sense to people who don’t use Twitter. If you do, you probably know that Twitter made a significant change to their service on Tuesday (May 12) by removing a setting that allowed users to choose which “@ replies” appeared in their stream. This is a response to that change. @chrismessina posted screenshots showing the change (see his first comment, too). Also, this response to the change makes some good points.]

From the Twitter blog:

This morning we received lots of great info about the replies setting we changed yesterday. Folks loved this feature because it allowed them to discover new people and participate serendipitously in various conversations. The problem with the setting was that it didn’t scale and even if we rebuilt it, the feature was blunt. It was confusing and caused a sense of inconsistency. We felt we could do much better. [emphasis added — Todd]

Perhaps, but when that setting has been around as long as @ replies, you could also do better than ripping it away from a lot of users who enjoyed it the way it was. You might be able to shrug and say, “Well, we had no way of knowing how strongly some people felt about this setting.” Balderdash. Presumably you can determine how many users of your own service have chosen “all @ replies” as their preference. And just as importantly, you already asked users for their opinion on this subject in a blog post a year ago. The response was not ambiguous. While 66 comments is not a significant percentage of Twitter users, the fact that most if not all comments were in favor of keeping the setting says a lot. Why was this ignored a year later?

So here’s what we’re planning to do. First, we’re making a change such that any updates beginning with @username (that are not explicitly created by clicking on the reply icon) will be seen by everyone following that account. This will bring back some serendipity and discovery and we can do this very soon.

If I’m not mistaken, this means all users will now see all replies with the seemingly arbitrary distinction of having been manually addressed to a particular user. Won’t this just upset everyone who wasn’t upset by your last change? I’m curious how this is somehow more scalable than just leaving the setting as it was and perhaps changing the default to “@ replies to the people I’m following” if that’s not what it already was.