This post is a follow up to Twitter Is A Cocktail Party by Jon Reid – follow him @jonmreid
The @replies Option
Until recently, Twitter had an “@replies” option that determined which replies you saw. The choices were so confusing that it needed an explanatory link, but even the explanation was confusing! Let me use a diagram to illustrate the choices and what they meant.
Consider this scenario: You are following A.
A replies to B: “@B blah blah”
The question is, do you see that reply or not?
If your setting was “all @ replies” then you would see the reply.
If your setting was “@ replies to the people I’m following” then you would see the reply only if you also followed B.
If your setting was “no @ replies” then you wouldn’t see the reply even if you also followed B.
It is important to note that this has nothing to do with someone replying directly to you. It’s all about replies to other people. And the fact that I have to add that shows that even with a diagram, my explanation is tricky to understand.
The Curtain Falls
Apparently, these options were not only confusing; something in the way they were implemented was actually causing Twitter to bog down. Remember, Twitter was not originally designed with replies in mind; replies were a user-driven convention which they added. But this means Twitter’s underlying infrastructure couldn’t keep up with things as the number of users increased. I suspect that the competition between Ashton Kutcher and CNN Breaking News to get a million followers was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Kutcher has 1,793,588 followers as of this writing, so when he posted a single reply, the Twitter software had to make millions of decisions.
So on May 12, Twitter changed things. There was no longer an option: We now see replies only if we are are also following the recipient. In the diagram above, if you do not follow B, you will not see the reply. While this change may have been necessary for technical reasons, the practical outcome was that it largely ended Twitter’s function as a mixer or cocktail party. You now only see general statements, or replies to your personal clique (the people you are following).
Let me illustrate the problem with an actual conversation about the change. I alerted my friends with a tweet reading, “FYI Twitter just made it so you can no longer see replies to people you don’t follow.” I received the following reply from my friend Julie, or @astrowebgirl:
This is a common misunderstanding about the original options, and about the change which makes it a very important question. I replied,
I think this was a useful exchange that might have benefited many people. So how many people saw it? In days past, many of Julie’s 1,737 followers would have seen her side, many of my 375 followers would have seen mine; anyone who was curious could click through to explore the other side, possibly finding an interesting new person to follow. That is a potential audience of 2,000 people.
But I really doubt that we have any followers in common. So the number of people who saw this (besides myself and Julie) is probably a big fat zero.
Right there, I think you can see how Twitter has been unusually beneficial in the past at transmitting information and enabling new connections. Less so today.
So Now What?
There was an immediate uproar in the Twitter community about this, largely through the #fixreplies tag and also through blog posts. And it seems Twitter got the message. They cannot simply restore things because the old options really were creating problems, but they have promised to develop a new feature that will let us see more tweets again.
That’s the good news, and it is good news. Until then, there are a few things we users can do:
- Be aware that you are not seeing all tweets.
- Occasionally click on people’s profiles to see their replies to people other than your friends.
- Be aware that if you post a reply, very few people will see it.
- If you want to reply more publicly, do not click reply or begin with @username.
That last point deserves an example. If I tweet something that you want to reply to, but you want your reply to be seen by people who don’t follow me, don’t click the reply arrow 
in the Twitter web interface (or whatever you do in your client), and don’t begin your message with my username, @jonmreid. Instead, start typing a regular tweet, and use some characters as a prefix at the beginning, such as “> ” which people are used to seeing in email replies. I suggest two characters, something and a space, to keep your name clickable in all Twitter clients. For example,
> @jonmreid Thank you for explaining about @ replies. I look forward to seeing what new thing Twitter implements.