> New Tweets that begin with a username will reach all your followers. (That means you’ll no longer have to use the ”.@” convention, which people currently use to broadcast Tweets broadly.) If you want a reply to be seen by all your followers, you will be able to Retweet it to signal that you intend for it to be viewed more broadly.
What if I don't want a reply to be broadcast in everyone's feed? (Not that it's private, but it's just not relevant and usually lacks context). Or are they saying that if you want it shown to everyone, retweet it and it'll show up to everyone?
If you are replying to a tweet, they won't show up for everyone. This only applies when composing a new tweet from scratch that starts with an @name (and behind the scenes does not contain an "in_reply_to", which if you want to broadcast to everyone, can now be retweeted).
Twitter have been largely ignoring SMS for years...
If you reply via an app or their website, they attach the id of the tweet you are replying to in their database. This is how they can show you a conversation timeline.
Note btw that their new "retweet with a comment" system breaks said timeline tracking...
The API can easily do this, and AFAIK any Twitter client you're likely to run into already does this. The SMS interface doesn't appear to support this, though.
I had the same confusion. I was missing the fact that there are apparently 3 separate things.
1) "new" tweets - reach all followers
2) replies - not seen by followers
3) retweets - not sure if these are "new" tweets, but they also reach all followers
Maybe there are other kinds of tweets also. I couldn't make any sense of this announcement until I realized that replies are not "new" tweets.
Vanilla retweets only show up on your followers' timelines if their TL doesn't already contain the tweet. The idea is that you shouldn't see the same tweet twice. (There is a timeout, I don't know how long it is)
I hope you meant the proverbial "you". Personally, I can't find a reason to expect any particular behavior in that case. I've never been able to figure twitter out.
> New Tweets that begin with a username will reach all your followers. (That means you’ll no longer have to use the ”.@” convention, which people currently use to broadcast Tweets broadly.) If you want a reply to be seen by all your followers, you will be able to Retweet it to signal that you intend for it to be viewed more broadly.
This is terrible. They are introducing a way to broadcast mentions without using .@, which is great. So why also making non-reply mentions forcefully broadcasted, with no way to hide them!?
I don't want my @ThreeUKSupport tweets to go to all my followers.
Actually companies make it hard on purpose to find an email address or contact form, because support is expensive. It's a well known trick to burry that deep within some bullshit interface with answers to questions you don't care about. I always find the "Was this helpful?" questions frustrating on support pages, because they don't have a "No, I want to freaking talk to somebody" button.
Did something change or can you DM anyone now? Last I remember, you had to either be following each other or the recipient had to opt-in to anyone being able to DM them. It may have changed recently (my Twitter usage has definitely dropped off a cliff in the last year or so, so I may have missed it)
Pretty much the equivalent of being cc'ed whenever someone emails a email address. There's a reason I filter out .@ in Tweetbot. I don't want to see all the "open complaining" like people looking to shame company X for wronging them somehow.
That fix was intended to hide replies before replies were a first class citizen. At that time there was no easy way to distinguish between a reply and a tweet that simply started with a @. Now that replies are first class citizens they can revisit this "fix". And plenty of people didn't like this fix when it was first introduced, that's why .@ started as a convention after it.
SMS was an after thought long before .@ started. Tweets starting with @ weren't treated specially, and replies weren't yet a thing. Then Twitter started hiding tweets that started with @ and there was a good amount of backlash from people complaining that this would reduce their ability to discover other interesting accounts by seeing who the people they follow interact with. Twitter however stuck with it and then the .@ convention started as a workaround. Now they are just going back to that original behavior except replies are an actual thing now so they can differentiate tweets that simply start with a @ from those that are actual replies, which couldn't be done when this change was first introduced.
Yet when they implemented the "retweet with a comment" system (embedding one tweet within another, accessed via the retweet button) they didn't think far enough ahead to avoid breaking their reply tracking. This because people have taken to using said system to respond to tweets.
I don't understand why Twitter never implemented some sort of categorization feature. There are many individuals that I'd follow if I could just get a subset of their tweets in my feed.
For example, I might want to follow scientists' tweets on science, but not their political or favourite sport team tweets. Right now it's either all or nothing, but why can't people categorize their tweets so only people interested in them see them? This would be better for both parties.
Same goes for Facebook. They surely have the ability to discern political posts from non-political ones, but the only control over what appears on our news feeds is follow/unfollow.
This is why I left Twitter after whole 3 days AFAIR. I followed several tech people, and the amount of content produced was just too much, particularly since 2/3 of it was random noise.
I'm missing out on some interesting discussions for sure, but I'd have to be on Twitter half a day each day to scroll through all this stuff.
This is why I can't bear to open the Twitter app. I signed up, and followed a few of the emergency agencies in SF, hoping to catch tweets about fires, accidents, etc. But these numbskulls keep blabbing away about awards, charity events, dinners, promotions, etc. etc. that it's basically useless. So I uninstalled the app a few days later.
Hah, we are doing this as a final project in a data science course I'm enrolled at. Not sure if we'll reach this goal, since there are a lot of interesting pieces before and time for it is really short.
These are great changes for the platform as I always felt the 140 characters was a difficult limitation for replies.
Perhaps, it would have been easier to just increase the general limit to 160 characters; avoiding so many work-arounds and different rules. I wonder what impact of 20 more characters would be in terms of hardware and bandwidth at Twitter's scale.
The 20 characters is for the handle of the person tweeting. I already have retweets not fit in a single text
1/2: @linuxhiker: RT @CALComputerCLub: Hey @ubuntu we donated 3 @lenovo laptops that we put Ubuntu 16.04 on to 3 students at a local middle school! https://t.co
2/2: /MArvqjNtip/s/KtTS
Twitter if you're reading, I'm ok with increasing limits on replies (with context) but don't raise the limit on ALL tweets.
>I wonder what impact of 20 more characters would be in terms of hardware and bandwidth at Twitter's scale.
I'm sure they're concerned less with the technical impact than the risk of changing the product somewhat drastically. The char limit is a fundamental aspect of twitter. It forces people to create curt, easily digestible content. Expanding that limit might have pretty bad side effects, such as people communicating the same message they would have in 140 chars, but more verbosely (which weakens the product).
> When replying to a Tweet, @names will no longer count toward the 140-character count. This will make having conversations on Twitter easier and more straightforward, no more penny-pinching your words to ensure they reach the whole group.
Hopefully this is just for replying to people mentioned in the original tweet, otherwise spam bots could have a field day with this. I'm guessing the people at Twitter already recognised this though.
As someone who has been using Twitter since 2006, all of these changes make sense to me, and I'm happy about them. But I can't imagine them being anything but more confusing to any casual user. I don't know what the right answer is, but making people remember more "rules" for what will make a Tweet show in peoples' timelines seems like a mistake.
Since the new algorithmic timeline you already have no way of knowing what shows up to who and when, it's up to them to decide who sees what based on inflating whatever engagement metric they think is important at a given time. (And who knows whatever other factors.)
My understanding is the rules are now simpler: A reply will not show up to your followers unless they follow the person being replied to, just as before. All other tweets will be shown.
I seem to remember some celebrity being mocked because their first tweet was unintentionally not broadcast as it started with '@'. I wouldn't be surprised if many users are initially confused by this feature, so hopefully this change will make things easier.
The new "broadcast @tweets to all of your followers" to me reads as "now your twitter feed will become even noisier".
On the other hand, their incredibly annoying "here's what you missed" and "non-linear timeline" feature will help limit that, combining the chocolate that I hate with the peanut butter that I can't stand into something approximately edible.
I can't say that this is an objectively bad move, but it definitely sounds like it'll erode Twitter's usefulness to me.
So what are the new limits if links, usernames etc. do not count against the 140 character limit? It will hopefully not be possible to create "monster" tweets with thousands of @ notifications and/or hundreds of images...
Links will still count towards the character limit for now as Twitter is concerned with abuse/spam. What we may see at some point is Twitter not counting the first link in a tweet against the 140, but counting subsequent links.
As for images, here's a limit of four per post, and Twittwr groups multi into a display with one URL. Videos, Vines and polls are capped at one.
It's possible to have many, many usernames in a reply, but I don't know if there is an upper bounds.
No they did not. They rate limited it so much they made third party clients not very useful. Also, most clients are limited to 100000 users, which is a limit some of them hit.
> New Tweets that begin with a username will reach all your followers. (That means you’ll no longer have to use the ”.@” convention, which people currently use to broadcast Tweets broadly.)
Conspiracy theory: they are doing this to fill our timelines with noise so we welcome all the algorithmic changes to the holy and sacred chronological order of our timelines.
It's entirely understandable to not understand why people use twitter, but how to use twitter is incredibly simple, beyond probably any other social network.
I disagree. After a couple meager attempts I never figured out how to naturally follow conversations, and quickly parsing abbreviation-filled snippets of text is a skill I think needs to be learned.
I suspect that Twitter became popular because it came before Instagram and Snapchat. If it had come after, it would be ignored.
I taught an MBA class with 11 students. They were required to use Twitter for a group assignment.
My shock when a large majority of them had never used it, and a large minority of the new users just couldn't figure out how to use it, and why it was useful.
Before: some @jerk keeps sending annoying tweets to @victim, but since they aren't .@ tweets only the victim sees them in their timeline, or people who follow both @jerk and @victim.
Now: @jerk continues to send annoying tweets to @victim, but now everyone who follows @jerk sees the attacks, so if they're like minded they can now pile on @victim too.
With everything that keeps going on, including celebrities leaving Twitter due to harassment issues and having to seriously bulk up their harassment rules and enforcement departments... you'd think they'd think about some of this stuff first.
You can now @mention up to 50 people, but ONLY THE FIRST WILL SHOW. So now you can easily harass huge groups of people and they won't even know why they're getting the tweet in the first place!
I don't see that this change will encourage harassment. @jerk could always have dot prefixed his tweets (as today) and have his followers see the mention. That's not new, it's just one character less they have to type.
I'm not saying there's no issue with online harassment (there is), but this doesn't make it any worse.
Precisely. Before you had to be purposeful about it by adding the . before the @.
Now it's automatic, and possibly unintended. Send a slightly rude tweet to someone you're mad at? Maybe sarcasm that some of your followers don't see as sarcasm? Now your friend may get harassed by your followers.
I didn't imagine it, it's a real problem, as is the new 50 @mention limit.
The difference is you had to be intentional about it before by adding the period. That's no longer necessary. So not only is it slightly easier, but people you don't set out to 'unleash your followers on' may now get attacked when before you were only doing a basic reply to them.
I'm not saying harassment doesn't exist, I'm saying this makes it WAY EASIER and that's a BIG ISSUE.
If by "people" you mean "vocal minority", and by "harassment" you mean "public replies to public postings".
There needs to be a warning of some kind. People seem very unclear on this and don't get that putting something into the tweet box is like shouting it on the street corner. People can and should be expected to shout back.
The only people who ask for anything are vocal minorities.
And when the public replies are from a swarm of shortlived anonymous accounts, but direct a storm of abuse at an individual's persistent online identity, as well as often any accounts with whom they have interacted... that's not just people shouting back, that's something wholly different and unique to the twitter environment.
While I have no doubt this happens (if anything happens on the internet, it's breeding a better asshole), I question whether it happens as much as some of the posts in this thread make it sound like.
As in, whether it happens enough to restrict the way most people interact with the site.
As a counterpoint, most of the onsite crowing I see about "abuse" and "harassment" on Twitter is of the "I said something publicly, responding to me publicly is harassment" variety. And then when I go look at the timelines, I don't see anything particularly awful.
Your posts are coming from someone who has likely never had to experience that. While that's good, and I hope you never do, stop trying to downplay the experiences of others.
I will absolutely not. When those experiences (were this any other field, we'd call them anecdotes) are being used as an argument to change the way something works for literal millions of unrelated and unknowing people, it is open to the same criticism, scrutiny, and verification that any other piece of data is.
While quietly pulling off the ability to have PNG and GIF profile images against what stated in the documentation [1], leaving only poorly encoded JPEG [2]. And JPEG images are double compressed.
For those concerned about the possible bandwidth issues or scalability issues Twitter might have implementing their 'even more' characters, don't forget we can post upwards of a 2-3MB JPEG and Twitter handles it just fine.
I always liked the idea of stuffing data in metadata. For me, most tweets are insubstantial and thinly veiled metadata. There are always those claiming a tweet 'means' something but the context is usually entirely missing, hence the phenomenon of 'subtweets' and worse: the dreaded tweetstorm.
I could even encode arbitrary data in a JPEG if I wanted and get back data byte for byte. I just wonder what my followers would make of such tweets and if they are clever enough to fuzz the JPEG for meaning and context.
Did I understand correctly that when I start a tweet with a username it will show up in the feeds of all my followers? That is pretty annoying, sometimes the conversation can be public but you don't want to bother anyone with it. Also, most people do not yet allow people who they don't follow to DM them.
Sounds exactly like that. Yet again Twitter goes: "you know all those things people keep asking for? let's do 4 different things and get rid of something with no workaround available".
This is so bad it's getting hilarious. I mean, either the leadership is completely unaware of issues people raise for years, or they are and intentionally neither comment on nor fix them. Either way - WTF? I honestly think they're just delusional about being too big to fail at this point. Another social network will make them the latest MySpace though, just a question of time.
103 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 59.2 ms ] thread> New Tweets that begin with a username will reach all your followers. (That means you’ll no longer have to use the ”.@” convention, which people currently use to broadcast Tweets broadly.) If you want a reply to be seen by all your followers, you will be able to Retweet it to signal that you intend for it to be viewed more broadly.
What if I don't want a reply to be broadcast in everyone's feed? (Not that it's private, but it's just not relevant and usually lacks context). Or are they saying that if you want it shown to everyone, retweet it and it'll show up to everyone?
Is that compatible with API consumers or the SMS interface? (Or are these both dead?)
If you reply via an app or their website, they attach the id of the tweet you are replying to in their database. This is how they can show you a conversation timeline.
Note btw that their new "retweet with a comment" system breaks said timeline tracking...
Quote retweets do what you'd expect, though.
I hope you meant the proverbial "you". Personally, I can't find a reason to expect any particular behavior in that case. I've never been able to figure twitter out.
This is terrible. They are introducing a way to broadcast mentions without using .@, which is great. So why also making non-reply mentions forcefully broadcasted, with no way to hide them!?
I don't want my @ThreeUKSupport tweets to go to all my followers.
I suppose this will force more use of DMs for interactions with businesses.
Likely added in response to many service providers using twitter as a support channel.
http://techcrunch.com/2009/05/12/twitter-decides-were-not-sm...
For example, I might want to follow scientists' tweets on science, but not their political or favourite sport team tweets. Right now it's either all or nothing, but why can't people categorize their tweets so only people interested in them see them? This would be better for both parties.
Undoubtedly this just sounds like a good idea to the "few orthogonal abstractions" hacker brain, but with the right UI it could work.
I'm missing out on some interesting discussions for sure, but I'd have to be on Twitter half a day each day to scroll through all this stuff.
Perhaps, it would have been easier to just increase the general limit to 160 characters; avoiding so many work-arounds and different rules. I wonder what impact of 20 more characters would be in terms of hardware and bandwidth at Twitter's scale.
1/2: @linuxhiker: RT @CALComputerCLub: Hey @ubuntu we donated 3 @lenovo laptops that we put Ubuntu 16.04 on to 3 students at a local middle school! https://t.co
2/2: /MArvqjNtip/s/KtTS
Twitter if you're reading, I'm ok with increasing limits on replies (with context) but don't raise the limit on ALL tweets.
@511NY: Closure on #BayonneBridge Both directions from New York Side to New Jersey Side https://t.co/Axv6AP1O0A/s/BiVD
m.twitter.com/511NY
I'm sure they're concerned less with the technical impact than the risk of changing the product somewhat drastically. The char limit is a fundamental aspect of twitter. It forces people to create curt, easily digestible content. Expanding that limit might have pretty bad side effects, such as people communicating the same message they would have in 140 chars, but more verbosely (which weakens the product).
Hopefully this is just for replying to people mentioned in the original tweet, otherwise spam bots could have a field day with this. I'm guessing the people at Twitter already recognised this though.
I seem to remember some celebrity being mocked because their first tweet was unintentionally not broadcast as it started with '@'. I wouldn't be surprised if many users are initially confused by this feature, so hopefully this change will make things easier.
On the other hand, their incredibly annoying "here's what you missed" and "non-linear timeline" feature will help limit that, combining the chocolate that I hate with the peanut butter that I can't stand into something approximately edible.
I can't say that this is an objectively bad move, but it definitely sounds like it'll erode Twitter's usefulness to me.
As for images, here's a limit of four per post, and Twittwr groups multi into a display with one URL. Videos, Vines and polls are capped at one.
It's possible to have many, many usernames in a reply, but I don't know if there is an upper bounds.
Conspiracy theory: they are doing this to fill our timelines with noise so we welcome all the algorithmic changes to the holy and sacred chronological order of our timelines.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/markets/2016/01/25/twitt...
It's entirely understandable to not understand why people use twitter, but how to use twitter is incredibly simple, beyond probably any other social network.
I taught an MBA class with 11 students. They were required to use Twitter for a group assignment.
My shock when a large majority of them had never used it, and a large minority of the new users just couldn't figure out how to use it, and why it was useful.
Before: some @jerk keeps sending annoying tweets to @victim, but since they aren't .@ tweets only the victim sees them in their timeline, or people who follow both @jerk and @victim.
Now: @jerk continues to send annoying tweets to @victim, but now everyone who follows @jerk sees the attacks, so if they're like minded they can now pile on @victim too.
With everything that keeps going on, including celebrities leaving Twitter due to harassment issues and having to seriously bulk up their harassment rules and enforcement departments... you'd think they'd think about some of this stuff first.
But wait, it gets worse:
https://twitter.com/chrisremo/status/735115850445783043
You can now @mention up to 50 people, but ONLY THE FIRST WILL SHOW. So now you can easily harass huge groups of people and they won't even know why they're getting the tweet in the first place!
facepalm
I'm not saying there's no issue with online harassment (there is), but this doesn't make it any worse.
Now it's automatic, and possibly unintended. Send a slightly rude tweet to someone you're mad at? Maybe sarcasm that some of your followers don't see as sarcasm? Now your friend may get harassed by your followers.
But @jerk is already .@ mentioning his (her?) @victims because that's how @jerk is.
The difference is you had to be intentional about it before by adding the period. That's no longer necessary. So not only is it slightly easier, but people you don't set out to 'unleash your followers on' may now get attacked when before you were only doing a basic reply to them.
I'm not saying harassment doesn't exist, I'm saying this makes it WAY EASIER and that's a BIG ISSUE.
There needs to be a warning of some kind. People seem very unclear on this and don't get that putting something into the tweet box is like shouting it on the street corner. People can and should be expected to shout back.
And when the public replies are from a swarm of shortlived anonymous accounts, but direct a storm of abuse at an individual's persistent online identity, as well as often any accounts with whom they have interacted... that's not just people shouting back, that's something wholly different and unique to the twitter environment.
As in, whether it happens enough to restrict the way most people interact with the site.
As a counterpoint, most of the onsite crowing I see about "abuse" and "harassment" on Twitter is of the "I said something publicly, responding to me publicly is harassment" variety. And then when I go look at the timelines, I don't see anything particularly awful.
Anyone with that mindset should start a blog.
[1] https://support.twitter.com/articles/127871 [2] https://twitter.com/vmdanilov/status/735142731945803780
I always liked the idea of stuffing data in metadata. For me, most tweets are insubstantial and thinly veiled metadata. There are always those claiming a tweet 'means' something but the context is usually entirely missing, hence the phenomenon of 'subtweets' and worse: the dreaded tweetstorm.
I could even encode arbitrary data in a JPEG if I wanted and get back data byte for byte. I just wonder what my followers would make of such tweets and if they are clever enough to fuzz the JPEG for meaning and context.
This is so bad it's getting hilarious. I mean, either the leadership is completely unaware of issues people raise for years, or they are and intentionally neither comment on nor fix them. Either way - WTF? I honestly think they're just delusional about being too big to fail at this point. Another social network will make them the latest MySpace though, just a question of time.