Yesterday Twitter implemented a change that, according to the powers that be, 98% of Twitter users wouldn’t notice. They took away an option – one that was not turned on by default, but one that people who use Twitter as a way to explore and find interesting people and conversations really depended on. Now, if you don’t use Twitter, or you never had changed the settings for @ replies, you probably don’t even see any difference and wonder what the point is.

First, though, a caveat: Twitter is, at this very moment, undergoing “Scheduled Maintenance” which could render this whole thing moot – in other words, they could just be changing it all back, ending the debate.

Even with the low 2% estimate of users who used the option, there are an estimated 6 million members on twitter – meaning that the change – essentially a dumbing-down of Twitter -  affects some 120,000 people. It’s like Twitter is using the public-relations form of the “Law of Large Numbers” to suggest that the change is minor (that’s the one where you terrify people by saying hundreds of people have the “swine flu”, without mentioning that hundreds of people out of over 6 billion is odds of tens of millions to one against YOU getting it). They’re quickly learning otherwise, as #fixreplies has become the top search term and has remained there since not long after the change. Ironically, the users they affected most are also the most likely to be true twitter devotees – that small number of people who likely use Twitter the most.

I could spout all sorts of bizarre conspiracy theories about them trying to alienate the people who “tweet too much” to reduce their server load, or that they’re doing it to satisfy this new influx of the nouveau-geek variety (a.k.a. Celebrities told by their publicists that “The Twitter is hot, get on it”). Quite frankly, though, most of them are pretty ridiculous. I tend to believe it was simply misguided – they were just catering to the “Lowest Common Denominator” way of operating. Even the heads of big, popular companies sometimes make mistakes because they live in their ivory towers *cough*ZUCKERBERG*cough* where they are only told what their underlings want them to hear before making decisions.  (Bitter? ME? In a country half owned by Bell Canada? How could I be bitter?)

The most disturbing aspect of it all, though, is the number of people who have absolutely NO understanding of what has been changed, or are so egocentric they want to insist that it is “No big deal” because it does not affect them and how THEY use Twitter. First I am going to address the former, then I will get to the latter.

The worst, most bizarre conspiracy theories are being spouted by people who don’t “get it”. They are just reacting to the whole “change is bad” thing, without grasping just what changed. One lad was absolutely convinced that the problem was with celebrities with 500K followers who only follow a dozen people – he insisted the change was made to benefit them. Sorry, Bub, but if they only follow a dozen people the amount of noise in their timeline is likely to be pretty small, plus they probably had the option to “See ALL @ replies” turned off anyway. Additionally, these people who seem to think that it is “polite” to follow back everyone who follows you seem to have no grasp of what it would be like to try and use twitter with fifty thousand or more people tweeting in their timeline. Let’s think this through for a second: if you are following 100,000 “fans”, and each of those fans tweets just once per day, that’s 100,000 tweets PER DAY. What purpose does this serve? I can’t keep up with the 100 people I follow some days, which produces well under 1000 tweets per day on average. It’s like they WANT to be part of a babbling mass rather than receive the occasional tweet back from someone they admire. Most clients can’t handle a 100,000 tweet per day volume at all to even allow filtering. But, I digress… the biggest problem with this thought process (you know, the one that involved following EVERYONE) is that it just creates a huge vector for spammers to privately message, well, EVERYONE. THAT kind of server load, basically created by swarms of bots, is exactly what will break Twitter.

Some thought it meant that it would lend them more privacy. PRIVACY? Anything on Twitter you put in your public timeline is PUBLIC – anyone can see it by looking at your profile. Every @ reply you make is visible when someone looks at your page of tweets. The whole point of Twitter is that it is open conversation – it is NOT a private chat service, nor is it  like email or a telephone. If you want to have a private conversation, you need to have it through the direct message system, NOT @ replies. When you speak on Twitter, it is like you are speaking in a loud voice in a crowded room – anyone who wants to hear it can and WILL hear it. Some people who DON’T want to hear it will also hear it. If YOU don’t want people to hear your conversation in a bar, you go to your car, or home, or someplace else. The same applies to Twitter.

Anyway, over and over I found people in this category who didn’t understand what the change meant, and in taking up the cause simply proved Twitter’s point that the function was too confusing, thus justifying removing it. EPIC Facepalm. These are the people that will provoke Twitter management to ruffle our collective hair and say, “There there, it’ll be all right, don’t worry your pretty little head.”

But then, there were the “I don’t use it anyway” crowd – they’re the ones who really piss me off. THEY are the group who never used the feature, didn’t understand it, and don’t think it is a big deal that it is gone – and seem more than willing to heap the power-users who DID use it with “You’re just over-reacting” type ridicule. Quite frankly, I see many of these people as the same kind of mindless sheep that the Jedi mind-trick works on.

“These are not the droids you are looking for.”

“These are not the droids we are looking for.”

“You love paying higher taxes.”

“We LOVE paying higher taxes.”

“You should throw a bunch of crap in rivers to protest losing the election and call it teabagging.”

“We love teabagging.”

No, dolts, you didn’t use the feature – and you know what that means? That means you are in a position to say NOTHING. The change did not affect you, so unless you are going to show solidarity with your Twitter friends who are being forced into conformity (and who knows, some of whom may have talked to you in the FIRST PLACE because of this “unimportant” and “minor” feature), you just need to STFU.

I do wonder what exactly the reaction of these people would have been if “All @ replies” had been forced ON rather than OFF. I believe that it would have been a most effective way to eliminate Twitter’s server scaling problems as these terribly confused sheeple rushed en masse for the “Delete account” button.

State of Mind: Alarmed & Angry