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Twitter changes @reply settings again, users protest


When the Twitter team was first figuring out how people liked to use the site's public reply feature, it introduced a set of three options for seeing @replies: you could either see replies to and from people you follow, from people you follow to anyone else (regardless of following), or no @replies at all. It was a decent system, and it gave people a choice about how much noise they wanted @replies to make.

Twitter has now removed the option, and the new default for every user is that @replies that are both to and from someone you follow will be visible, but other @'s won't. The change was announced in a blog post called Small Settings Update. The move appears to have been made because an overwhelming number of users had been using replies this way, but I'm already seeing a bit of a frenzy in my normally-calm Twitter stream from people who liked discovering new users by seeing their friends @ them.

Perhaps the recent popularity of Twitter as a way to contact celebrities -- we're post-Oprah here, people -- made users a little sick of seeing the people they followed replying to celebrities they didn't follow or care about. There's a fairly simple solution to that, though: change the @reply settings yourself. I'm not sure what Twitter gained by removing the option, but I'm sure it will become clear when they respond to the backlash. My prediction: the settings go back to normal by the end of the week, or we hear a much better reason for the change.
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