
How Twitter broke Twitter - gronkie
http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/twitter-broke-twitter/
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nollidge
It'd be great if .@ would still count as a reply (i.e. that tweet would still
contain a pointer to the tweet it's replying to) but be visible by everyone.
It's the best of both worlds.

Also I wonder what happens if you hit Reply, but then delete or modify the
@username. Is it still counted as a reply to that person's tweet, and
therefore only visible to the intersection of your followers?

EDIT: s/union/intersection

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martingordon
I just did some testing on Twitter for Mac:

* Having the @username anywhere in the tweet preserves the pointer.

* Deleting the username clears out the pointer.

* Deleting the username, and retyping it (at the end of the tweet) restores the pointer.

The last scenario makes me think that the validation is server side. It seems
that Twitter ensures that the tweet still mentions the author of the replied-
to tweet or it will clear out the pointer.

~~~
abraham
Replies are triggered by two factors. An `in_reply_to_status_id` field that is
filled in behind the scenes and an @mention of the original author in the
text.

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Permit
I apologize if this is off topic, but from the other comments it seems that
everyone here was aware of this .@ command (something I'd never heard of
before). Is there some kind of list where all these special commands may be
found?

~~~
nollidge
It's not really a command, just convention. If my tweet begins with @Permit,
then it's only visible to the intersection of your and my followers, so
somebody that follows me but not you would not see it. But if I start it with
anything else (people have just adapted . as a convention, but it could be
anything) then it's visible to ALL of my followers. Except, as this article
explains, if I used the formal Reply button on one of your tweets.

EDIT: s/union/intersection

~~~
Dylan16807
I'm confused. I'm looking around at a few accounts and I see a LOT of them
starting with @whatever where I do not follow the other person. Is this a
setting somewhere? Did I completely misunderstand? And they show up whether or
not I am logged in, whether or not I am following the person using @whatever.

Are you sure this tweet-hiding applies when _not_ using the Reply button?

~~~
abraham
If you look directly at someones profile you will see all of their tweets
regardless of who they are too. The reply behavior only applies to the tweets
you see in your home timeline.

~~~
Dylan16807
Oh. Thank you.

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mattberg
i'm actually happy about this. i hate when my twitter stream gets flooded with
people who use ".@" when replying to someone else. no offense to those people,
but i generally don't care about your out of context reply that much.

~~~
untog
I think the point is that it isn't usually a reply. ".@SomeUser just totally
nailed the presentation!" for tedious example. It's just tweeting a sentence
that starts with someone's name.

~~~
jarek
Yes, but if you write that out, it will show up, because it's not a reply.
It's only when you hit "reply" and post something that isn't really a reply
that the behaviour breaks down.

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josscrowcroft
_"Is your face starting to twitch yet?"_

I'm a Twitter user, and I can guarantee that my face is not starting to
twitch. Not from this news, at least, possibly from the coffee.

I see what he's getting at but I don't honestly think this warrants the
sensational tone...

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joejohnson
This is disappointing. Twitter is great because it is so simple; they should
pick the simplest behavior for any user action and stick with it so users can
be fully aware of what every action does.

~~~
cbs
I agree. The real problem has nothing to do with tweets, it is about non-
obvious, non-intuitive, obscure functionality with no clear way to learn.

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yepreally
The real problem with Twitter and why it has only caught on to a smaller
subset of the population than Facebook is that its interface and usage are not
intuitive enough. This example is case-in-point.

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dacort
I'm pretty sure it's been this way for quite some time now...

~~~
franze
i remember it was a pretty big topic after twitter changed (hijacked) the RT
convention. there was an outcry because twitter justified it at first with "UX
streamlining", but as a matter of fact it was a scalability issue. (or maybe
i'm mixing up two different controversial decisions by twitter into one...)

... but everyone got used to it and the .@ convention was adopted pretty fast.

update: this is the "usability feature"
<http://blog.twitter.com/2009/05/small-settings-update.html>

this is the truth <http://blog.twitter.com/2009/05/replies-kerfuffle.html>

this is the actual hijacking [http://blog.twitter.com/2009/03/replies-are-now-
mentions.htm...](http://blog.twitter.com/2009/03/replies-are-now-
mentions.html)

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mmahemoff
I do hope Twitter clarify this with a blog post, that's the kind of community
responsiveness the management would have shown a few years back.

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knowtheory
7 Comments and no one with anything interesting to say. Sad times at Hacker
News.

Fan out of messages is one of Twitter's greatest challenges. When looking at
the compromise one has to make with the CAP theorem
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_theorem> ), Twitter previously chose to
jettison Availability, hence the fame and recognition that the Fail Whale
received.

They have since decided that Availability was more important to them than
Consistency.

I had simply attributed the inconsistency in the messages I'd received and the
conversations I'd missed to the number of followers/follows I'd grown to, but
I guess I'm not surprised to see that this is a broader issue.

