Many members of the community woke up this morning to blogs bemoaning a small but impacting change to user settings: It is no longer possible to see @reply conversation directed at people not already in your follow network. It is ironic that today may set some unofficial record for conversation on Twitter.
Twitscoop notes the rise of @reply change protest
The change, reported yesterday, sparked some trending topics that have exploded this morning. People who likely never knew the feature option existed—the default setting, buried in the Twitter user settings on the web site, is the one everyone now has—are twittering in uproar, fueled by angry headlines on popular blogs. The small percentage of users who changed that default to show out-of-network conversation (stats only Twitter possesses) likely doesn’t match the vitriolic reaction showing up on Twitscoop.
Historically, there has been confusion about this little-known setting. The wording implies control over external interaction initiated by people not in your network, not voyeuristic glimpses at the people to whom your network is talking. In the first interpretation, the setting becomes a prevention mechanism for @reply spam, something that typically affects only those with huge networks and some measure of celebrity status. In the second correct interpretation, the setting allows you to see beyond your network through the tweets of those you already have chosen to follow.
There are three main issues that arise from this change:
- Value of out-of-network conversation awareness
- User control of the personal information stream
- Cost of functionality
One other issues is relevant, too, and discussed a bit later.
Value of out-of-network conversation awareness
For myself, my misinterpretation—I wanted to let anyone reply to me—is what led me to change from the default setting in the first place. Particularly when my network was considerably smaller, I used that mode of discovery to find people in Bloomington or other alumni. As my understanding of the feature changed and my network grew, I turned it back to the default to show only conversation with people already in my network.
This had the immediate effect of quieting people I found too chatty. My information stream grew calmer and allowed for further expansion to follow others, people I likely would not have followed because of their own conversational habits or because my threshold of information had been reached. Turning this setting off allowed me to become more connected. The need for discovery lessened to the point where I didn’t miss the out-of-network conversation.
So, yes, the feature that went missing has value, but it isn’t universal value for all people, nor is it suitable for all stages of network growth.
User control of the personal information stream
If anything, the ideal response would be to give users more control over fine-tuning information streams, not fewer. I would still love to see the out-of-network conversations of my local tweeps—to help me continue to identify Bloomingtonians who have joined the system—but my network now contains many different social circles, some of which I don’t have the capacity to join and track. I don’t need the conversational awareness for those people. It would be wonderful to be able to filter content on an individual basis.
Sometimes, however, having more control increases the barriers to use, rather than lowering them. One of Twitter’s strengths is found in its simplicity. More is not always better, especially when there is a vibrant ecosystem of developers ready to scratch the itches of niche groups within the larger community. I don’t have enough information to support the decision to get rid of this particular @reply control, but I do agree with a general philosophy for Twitter to simplify.
Cost of functionality
The underlying assumption is that some internal analysis was conducted to determine that the technical implementation might be improved if Twitter didn’t have to deal with this particular option. Apparently, not many people were taking advantage of this setting, and the patterns of use the analysts can monitor provided evidence that the feature wasn’t adding significant value to Twitter. The only people who can speak to this directly, of course, are the ones who made the decision, so the issue of technical cost-benefit can only presume to be noteworthy.
There is a cultural cost, too. I’m not speaking about the reaction of the Twitter community today, but rather the norms that arise from the 140 character constraint of the channel.
Twitter already made a significant (and widely welcomed) change to include “mentions”—when @username is used anywhere in the message, not just at the beginning of the tweet—a couple months ago. This made it possible to track conversation about you without having to conduct vanity searches or set up special alerts. Although I don’t yet have significant evidence from my research on this point, I suspect that the increased visibility had an impact on how often people reference other usernames, knowing that they would become visible.
The @reply convention was historically flawed. Originally, it allowed a message to be tied to a single user—the one referenced at the beginning of the tweet—regardless of mentions. It could also be attached to the wrong tweet, since there wasn’t a way for third-party developers to associate a reply with a particular message. In fact, @replies were a cultural contribution of the early adopting Twitter community and not something that was part of the original design (about 1 in 4 tweets is a reply).
It seems to me like there is a conscious effort by Twitter to guide use of the system toward more powerful implicit controls. If you want to have someone not in your network see your tweet, a simple @username mention in the context of the message will accomplish that. If you want to help reduce your own network noise, use the @reply convention at the start of the message to keep it relevant to the people who follow you. No need for special settings; this is a behavioral change that puts the onus on the publisher to help make relevancy decisions.
A participant community
There is a fourth key issue: Twitter must involve their user base in decision making about changes. It is not sufficient to simply look at the statistical footprint of use and make unilateral decisions, often without much (if any) advance warning. There are literally millions of people from which to select random samplings and invite into conversations, focus groups and surveys, to get more grounded evidence to support decisions to change the service. I have to assume that Twitter does some of this kind of user experience inquiry, but I have no way of knowing without even more transparency from the company on their process.
For the moment, let’s assume that costs—both technical and cultural—outweighed the benefit of having the option to show out-of-network @replies. Let us also assume that there is a greater plan at work with an eye at shaping the Twitter community behavior for the better. If the decisions came out internally without involving significant input from the people using the system, then Twitter fails the same UX test that guides most technology-driven businesses.