Bicyclistic

Final Update With their 4th blog post on the issue Twitter have fully explained how and why the fiasco of #fixreplies happened. In short the post has returned them to the Twitter I love, and renders everything I’ve written below irrelevant. I am fully happy with every aspect of the post, and impressed with their response. Thank you to Biz Stone and the gang.

Original Post No Longer Applicable:
No great surprise that Twitter finally admitted the real reason for the @reply change was an engineering one of scalability rather than the original nonsense of saying it was removed because it was too confusing for the people like myself who had gone to the trouble of selecting the option.

The problem with lying is you lose trust. And loyalty. Never mind the rebuild of this functionality, twitter needs to act fast to rebuild trust with so many people who have loved it for so long.

Before I revisit my views, I’m waiting to see what they do next.

Update #1: A per-user feature that will address what was lost is planned. And before it’s in place an interim solution of allowing again replies, by people you follow to people you don’t follow, to be seen - but only if they enter the name by not clicking the reply swoosh icon, is farcical.

People will continue to hit reply and therefore be unseen, or they’ll type and be seen by everybody - including the 97% of users who previously opted or defaulted not to see them - and who will then have no way of knowing what it was in reply to. And expect an increase in bad spellings.

So? With a plan in place for a sort-of long-term fix, I’ll reluctantly play for now, but twitter has lost over 90% of its effectiveness for me. I’m not being abstract, that’s the reduction in my twitterstream that I used to get value from. Twitter, you’re on probation. [update: and within hours they've passed - impressive]