#Fixreplies: clarifying the latest Twitter protest

It seems many people are jumping on the latest twitter protest bandwagon without fully understanding the change. Hopefully this will be a bit more clear than Twitter's own explanation.

What you'll still see

1. Mentions (@ in the middle of a tweet)
2. #followfriday
3. any other hash meme that uses mentions
4. replies to people you follow
5. replies to you
6. replies to you from people you don't follow

What you won't see

1. replies to people you don't follow (only messages starting with @)

What I'm not sure about

1. multi-recipient replies starting with someone you don't follow and including people you do follow

I understand Twitter's desire for a simple, consistent user experience, but this change kills one of my absolute favorite parts of twitter: discovery through conversation. I found most of my favorite tweeters through clicking on a reply that was related to a conversation I was in; a reply that I never would have seen with the new reply behavior. This not only kills that most serendipitous of discovery methods, but diminishes the conversation itself. Future interactive fiction projects like DeathTweet 08 (I'm sorry if you missed it. I was a smashing interdimensional scifi/fantasy cage match presented by @mattfnwallace and @mightymur [I'm probably leaving someone out here]) will be greatly dimished.

This change should have been made to default option settings rather than taking the option away. It has been a long time since I've looked at the settings, but I seem to remember the current behavior being the default option at one time when we had a choice. If I am not mistaken on that point, it should have been telling that people intentionally chose to change the setting.

I hope that helps clear up any confusion you may have had with the twitter reply change. Keep up the fight for good user experience.