Twitter’s Response to #fixreplies: We Can’t

http://mashable.com/2009/05/13/twitter-fixreplies/

by alexfarran • 17 years ago

9 18 17 years ago

jrockway• 17 years ago

"We can't" has got to be a blatant lie. It worked two days ago.

Let's say they changed the architecture so that @replies go to a dedicated queue, and not to the public timeline queue. The solution is simple, then... make two copies when posting, one for each destination. But I don't think this is the issue, since supposedly mutual followers will see the @reply in your public timeline. So I really don't get it.

Twitter--. They are either incompetent, or are lying.

eelco• 17 years ago

As these things go, it's probably more complex than that. Still, I'm also very interested in why this won't work for Twitter's (current) architecture.

ivankirigin• 17 years ago

I wouldn't trivialize the scaling issues at a company growing 100% monthly.

The scaling issue was technically the second excuse. They initially said it was a user experience issue.

dws• 17 years ago

Giving them the benefit of the doubt, it's possible that both are true. They may have been pondering user experience when scaling needs pushed them into making a decision.

tptacek3• 17 years ago

Or the cost of supporting the feature in the real world exceeds the value of the feature to their business.

But I really liked the part of your post where you were like, "assume they have queues like this, and then all you have to do is that!" Because I'm sure you're right, and to a competent developer, everything at Twitter is that simple.

I am however a bit confused about the "lying" part. Uh... why? What would be motivating them to decieve you?

Retric2• 17 years ago

"We can't" has got to be a blatant lie. It worked two days ago.

Each paragraph was an independent thought.

  A)  They are lying.
  B)  I wonder why they lied. I guess it might be hard if...
  C)  Ok, they might just be stupid.

PS: Twitter is still dealing with trivial amounts of data relative to what many people on HN work with. Plenty of projects do difficult things with gigabytes of data every second and twitter is far from that scale.

Tichy2• 17 years ago

They have to be lying. There is nothing special about those @replies - if anything, it would be more difficult not to show them than to show them.

They are still running the regexp to replace @twittername with a link anyway (because it works if the @username appears later in the tweet).

tlrobinson• 17 years ago

I'm confused. We'll no longer see @replies from people we don't follow? If so, that's awful.

Good thing Twitter bought Summize, as it's quickly becoming the most useful part of Twitter. Search "to:username" gives you this exact functionality.

dreish• 17 years ago

I believe the scenario is:

  Your username: you
  You are following: friend
  You are not following: stranger.

stranger tweets: @friend #Scala works4me (using jcl.Conversions) where is your pain point?

friend tweets: @stranger I wish the would be like Clojure or better work on an Iterator instead of lists

The way it worked before, you would have the option to see both of these messages, one of these, or none of these. Now you get to see none of them. @you tweets are unaffected.

I'm finding it hard to find a clear description of this anywhere, so I might be incorrect.

smokinn• 17 years ago

I was wondering about this too. I've been looking it up and have come to the same conclusion.

Personally, I liked seeing conversation fragments. If the reply looked interesting I could easily enough click on the other person's username to load their tweets and get the question/conversation.

ashot• 17 years ago

I think what you will not see is your friend's tweet @stranger in your timeline, which you didn't by default anyway. All is still visible on the profile page, hence stranger's tweets are not affected.

tptacek3• 17 years ago

I know I'm in the minority here, but I actually like it that way --- and not just as a reader (I already unchecked the checkbox) but as a writer. It always bugged me to think that I was cluttering up other people's feeds with @responses, which made me feel obliged to rewrite them to be generally applicable.

matthew-wegner• 17 years ago

I had enabled this preference, too.

The ironic thing about Twitter forcing this is that those of us who wanted it this way are going to be screwed, too. People are already prefixing @replies to get around the issue. The preference has moved from the receiver to the sender. If someone wants you to see a conversational reply they'll just do "PR @username" or whatever.

The result is that has Twitter actually removed all choice for people on both sides of the issue. Whoops!

Tichy2• 17 years ago

No it's worse (from what I understand): you don't see if somebody you follow replies to somebody you don't follow. So they filter tweets out of the timeline of your friends, that you don't get to see anymore.

znbailey• 17 years ago

It looks like they announced they will be making a concession to bring back at least some of the old behavior:

http://blog.twitter.com/2009/05/we-learned-lot.html

The jist: they're bringing back the old behavior only when the message starts with @username (and hasn't been created clicking the reply icon).

It sounds like they made a technical change which trumps the actual message content with a piece of reply-to metadata, which is either explicitly included by the client or parsed by their infrastructure.

Previously I believe it was "dumb" and didn't examine anything, and it was up to the client to filter based on the content of the message when it came to showing half-conversations.

windsurfer• 17 years ago

I know I probably shouldn't do this, but... the basic problem with Twitter, as it relates to discussions, is it's severe restriction on num

Twitter’s Response to #fixreplies: We Can’t

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