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

By: Drew B

Drew B — Fri, 22 May 2009 19:22:21 +0000

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

By: Rachel Strate

Rachel Strate — Mon, 18 May 2009 21:59:12 +0000

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.

By: T@SendChocolate

T@SendChocolate — Fri, 15 May 2009 09:20:48 +0000

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?

By: Lee Willis

Lee Willis — Fri, 15 May 2009 09:20:40 +0000

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.

By: Erika

Erika — Fri, 15 May 2009 08:45:55 +0000

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.