#fixreplies

I have been in transit, running from conference to conference in the UK, so I missed the initial news about Twitter’s #fixreplies mess.

Biz’s latest post attempting (I guess) a recap and mea culpa just doesn’t scan for me:

[from #Twitter Blog: The Replies Kerfuffle]

Twitter evolves and thrives on how folks use it. Some of our best features are invented by users, so listening is extremely valuable. Replies and conversations are awesome and we fully intend to support and encourage their growth.

[Ok, good, good…]

We removed a setting that 3% of all accounts had ever touched but for those folks it was beloved. The use cases that folks loved about this setting will return in a new and improved form.

[That’s in the same paragraph?]

Shades of Zuckerberg! They decide to unilaterally change something that some number of their precious users rely on (presumably the serious ones, who know how and why to change default settings to get a richer experience) without mentioning it in advance. And then say that they love us!

Ok, so let’s imagine that this feature — showing @replies from people I don’t follow when replying to people I do follow — is in some way a hog. Couldn’t they try some better algorithm to make it less of a piggish feature? Just dropping all functionality that is hard to make perform well is dumb.

Not Twitter’s finest hour.