How Twitter broke Twitter
theincidentaleconomist.com
How Twitter broke Twitter
1–10 of 36 posts
Re: How Twitter broke Twitter
#2This 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.
Re: How Twitter broke Twitter
#3i'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.
Re: How Twitter broke Twitter
#4It'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
Re: How Twitter broke Twitter
#5I 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?
Re: How Twitter broke Twitter
#6i'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.
I get that, but what if there's a discussion you would care about, but they used .@ so you can't follow the thread without scanning and trying to match up timestamps? I'd rather err on the side of allowing tweeters to do something potentially annoying than preventing them from doing something useful.
Re: How Twitter broke Twitter
#7It'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
I think that hitting "reply" should still contain a pointer even if you don't include the @username. Doesn't the threaded-reply already imply that you're addressing that person?
Re: How Twitter broke Twitter
#8I 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?
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
Re: How Twitter broke Twitter
#9It'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
I think that hitting "reply" should still contain a pointer even if you don't include the @username. Doesn't the threaded-reply already imply that you're addressing that person?
I think that would require a tweak to the UI to make it more obvious that a tweet is a reply. There's already some subtle stuff there (small-font "in reply to" and I think a little curved arrow), but the most obvious part that the content starts with "@".
Re: How Twitter broke Twitter
#10I'm pretty sure it's been this way for quite some time now...