Ashley Baxter

I'm a 23 year old Director from the West Coast of Scotland. I run a small business, play a lot of video games, eat scones with jam, and wonder why I'm not obese.

Major #fixreplies Confusion

Major #fixreplies Confusion

So, Twitter. Yeah. It’s great. Been on it for two years now. Fab.

I know I’m unfashionably late to the party (so late that everyone else is no doubt at another party), but something I saw today reminded me of the confusion I experienced a month back in regards to the @replies timeline change.

If you weren’t following the person a reply was directed at, it would no longer appear in your timeline. Okay, that’s fine (well, apparently not as it caused major uproar), but that’s actually always been the case with me. And I just thought that was the standard until now.

The only time I was made to think otherwise was when I was having a very embarrassing and public argument with a friend. I thought “Ok, this is lame, but none of my followers are going to see it, so I’ll add in an extra STFU”. Someone responded with “Get a room”, which of course was perfectly justified. I thought it odd he could see the conversation when he wasn’t following my friend, but never thought any more of it.

Until a month back when Twitter was rife with complaints of this apparent change. So… I’m confused. Why have I never been able to see replies from my followers to people I’m not following, or have I missed what #fixreplies is about entirely?

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 24th, 2009 at 8:14 am and is filed under Personal.
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2 Responses to “Major #fixreplies Confusion”

  1. Sam Brown Says:

    June 24th, 2009 at 9:21 am

    It was a preference. The default setting was “Only show @replies from people I am following”, but you could change that to “Show all @replies”, a very small percentage had changed it to the latter so they saw everyone’s @replies and could follow the conversation flow.

    This was causing a fair bit of stress to Twitter so they removed the option and reverted those back to the default setting of “Only show @replies from people I am following”. That small percentage of people were the angry ones.

    My problem with the whole situation is that now those people take measures into their own hands to show everyone in their timeline the @replies, things like >@ashley or .@ashley – I chose not to see everyones replies but now I’m being forced to see them.

    The moral of the story is you can’t give users interchangeable preferences and then remove that preference once everyone is used to it and been using it for several years.

  2. admin Says:

    June 24th, 2009 at 9:28 am

    Oh! I see. Thanks for clearing that up.

    There’s a guy I’m following who now puts a dot before his replies, and tbh I’m not interested in seeing what he’s conversing about with others, especially as it’s always a subject I have no interest in.

    Twitter has been pissing me off lately with all the #squarespace shite, RT competitions, and I’ve noticed people automatically Tweeting “Get 200 followers in 2 hours” once a day (obviously they’ve clicked through and somehow unawarely given permission for this to be Tweeted via their account). Yes, there’s been a lot of unfollowing going on on my end :p

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