Dan Phiffer

Content visibility shouldn’t be implicit

There’s been a lot of drama about Twitter’s reply behavior lately. It’s unnecessary to defend The Management on this one, but I do think the old system was kind of broken. The rules controlling content visibility (who sees which tweets) were too complicated. To get a full picture of how they worked you’d have to grasp both the difference between a reply and a mention and explore all of the so-called “small settings”. Otherwise you’d likely find that something you wrote was winding up somewhere you didn’t expect it to be. The problem for me is there’s too great a chance that inexperienced users don’t fully understand these rules. This remains an open issue.

The social context for a conversation — who I think is hearing me — informs everything about what I’m saying and how I choose to express myself. When I was only following a few people, it seemed there was some semblance of privacy on Twitter. I thought @-message replies might only be visible to those they were addressed to. Through a series of minor discoveries I managed to piece together a better picture of how content visibility works. Aha, I can “overhear” my friend’s conversations! Wait, how did that person, outside my group of friends, overhear us? Oh look, a settings page! Content visibility, as it worked before, was way too complicated.

The longer I’ve used Twitter (and social software in general) the more I’ve realized that everything should be assumed to be public. Your updates are searchable and disseminated out through the public timeline. There are RSS feeds and services using the API to traverse content in new and interesting ways. Users must understand they’re writing in public. Of course you can protect your updates altogether, but that all-or-nothing choice is (currently) as much control you get as a writer. It’s important that users understand what type of control readers of their content will have. It’s currently too easy for new users to miss this basic premise and risk embarrassment or worse.

On some level I think this is a tension between new and established users, a kind of throwback to usenet’s eternal September. Those posting with the #fixreplies hashtag are upset because they liked how it used to work. Resistance to change is, of course, understandable. But the narrative here isn’t authority figure unjustly wields power (see: Facebook Beacon) but rather a trade-off was made that favors new users. As Twitter’s userbase continues to grow, expect to see more concessions to make the service more appropriate to a less savvy audience. The official word is that the change was needed because the old way wasn’t scaling up, but either way it still boils down to making way for the n00bs.

Despite its initial attempt to assuage the user backlash, Twitter’s new content visibility model is just as complicated as before if not more so. I don’t know what the final solution should be, but at the very least it should be much more explicit about which of my followers will see an update I’m posting. The implicit difference between clicking the “reply icon” (or something equivalent from the myriad third-party clients) and manually typing @user is simply too subtle. Twitter has rightfully earned a reputation for simplicity and straightforwardness, but in this case I think there’s more refinement to be done.