Twitter ‘RA’ – Reply All – emerges after changes to replies

May 15th, 2009

This week Twitter updated their system so that we don’t see replies by people (ie messages beginning with @username) unless we’re also following the recipient of the message.

To counteract these new ‘hidden’ replies, some Twitter users are beginning to pre-fix their messages with “RA”, to escape the filter. The RA phrase stands for ‘Reply All’, and it’s a variant on the popular RT (Re-Tweet) prefix that is used when messages are forwarded.

Here’s an example of a RA (Reply All) message from one of my connections:

“RA @philsheard where from? (RA = Reply All)“

In case you haven’t heard about these changes here is a some background: Ev Williams, one of Twitter’s founders, explained that it’s so you won’t hear the answer to a question you didn’t hear. It’s a streamlining of the experience which many will appreciate but that others will miss as it allowed additional ways to discover new people to follow. There is follow-up comment on the Twitter blogposts We Learned A Lot and The Replies Kerfuffle.

Do you think that RA is a good idea to deliberately spread messages, or would you prefer not to hear them at all?

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5 Responses to “Twitter ‘RA’ – Reply All – emerges after changes to replies”

Erika on May 15, 2009 9:45 am
The trouble with all these workarounds is that the choice of seeing all replies has been taken from the reader and given to the broadcaster. That can’t possibly be a good thing! I personally get a lot out of seeing replies to people I don’t know, especially when they’re from industry-related people who then introduce me to other people I might want to get to know, but I feel it’s a little presumptious to assume that all my followers want to see the same from me.
Lee Willis on May 15, 2009 10:20 am
OK, some opinions

1. This move has obviously been done to counteract a scalability issue. Given that the scalability problem is certainly fixable, we can only assume that Twitter don’t want to invest in fixing it (Whether that’s through engineering time, or direct hardware/infrastructure cost) – this is a reflection of the fact that it is a free service. Would it be more palatable to have ads added into your twitter stream?

2. I don’t like RA because it takes the choice of whether to listen to a conversation out of the readers hands, and puts it into the authors (I consider it akin to SHOUTING).

3. Twitter already had the right solution in their preferences – I’m disappointed that they didn’t spend some time trying to get people to switch preferences. In my eyes this was the right solution to the problem in pt. 2 above

4. If they *did* do that, and the end result was that people still didn’t change preferences – then obviously people like seeing replies, and taking that facility away from the service will just make people stop using it.

The main problem is that twitter haven’t worked out how to monetize the service before their appetite for investment ran out. IMHO there are plenty of things they could and should be doing to solve this. Blocking conversations isn’t one of them.

I’d have been more happy for them to blanket reset everyone’s preferences (Achieving the same effect), but then letting people who wanted to change it back.
T@SendChocolate on May 15, 2009 10:20 am
I have actually had a follower that I know IRL DM me and ask me to stop RA and ..@ because it forced him to be spammed by my stream. While I understand that, it is frustrating, because now NO ONE is happy. The “3%” of users who found the @replies tab helpful and instrumental in their social networking lose out, and the people who didn’t use it lose out because they have to hear cross-talk they once were able to filter.

MASSIVE #twitterfail and with friendfeed and their roll out of the new live stream? Pretty sure that I will spend less time on twitter. Why would I want to trust and devote myself to a platform that doesn’t give a crap about me?

T.
Rachel Strate on May 18, 2009 10:59 pm
Yeah, I must agree with these comments. It is a massive twitter fail. I understand that perhaps they made these changes due to their continual scalability issues, but they are withdrawing choice from the user. With how much VC money has been plowed in the deal they should engineer the service correctly rather than creating work arounds.

Just my two cents.
Drew B on May 22, 2009 8:22 pm
To Lee’s point, this is definitely in response to the scalability issue. I read that the @ settings is a real headache for them at Twitter. This is such a shame. For me the best setting for Twitter in the early days was IM compatibility, which they had to can about 18 months ago. I plugged Twitter into IM on my BlackBerry and when they stopped that I would have moved on if there was an alternative.

Maybe some bright spark will invent a platform that takes things a step on from Twitter and does the things they cant do.

But on the RA thing. You don’t need to do that, just don’t put your @’s at the front of your message if you want others to see it. That’s how I do it anyway. Like this http://twitter.com/drewb/status/1862315690