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Tell HN: Twitter changed default settings to only receive DM from verified users

44 points by dysoco ↗ HN
Last night I learned that Twitter has changed its default Direct Message settings so that by default, you can only receive DMs from people that don't follow you ONLY if they are verified.

This is obviously really bad for people who use Twitter for business, journalism, etc. and want to be contacted by anyone. Also, a really shady move since apparently it hasn't been publicly announced.

More importantly, switching the setting back to "allow all users" seems not to work that well for me, since I changed the settings last night and it's back to "only from verified accounts" as of this morning, I hope this is an unintentional bug, however I've seen reports of that happening to other users as well.

Some sources:

https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1680156192876756992

https://twitter.com/snafuqd/status/1680037620041039873

https://twitter.com/halomancer1/status/1680039297637040129

8 comments

[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 34.5 ms ] thread
zimpenfish
Ran into this today when a company wanted me to DM them some details. They didn't quite understand the whole "I can't DM you until you follow me" problem (but luckily I'd solved the problem myself anyway.)
qmarchi
As a personal report, I too can confirm that this option was changed on my account as well.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
readonlyaccount
You can use Reddit - your DMs are safe there.

I'm just hearing....that Reddit have just deleted everyone's DMs.

gnicholas
Twitter has been playing with this type of thing for a long time (pre-Elon). I tried to DM a few people who say "DMs are open" in their profiles, and it wouldn't let me. I remember being frustrated because it didn't fail until I tried to hit 'send' — it let me sit there and compose/edit my message without telling me that it was going to refuse to send.

I found this odd and annoying, since I very rarely send DMs, am not a bot, and do not have bot-like behavior.

tmaly
This sounds like LinkedIn?

People pay X dollars to be able to spam your inbox.