Twitter announced a bunch of changes to its service today. Some are useful, some are terrible. If the past informs the present, there will be a lot of hand-wringing before people reluctantly continue using a useful service thatâs often misunderstood by the company that created it.
Many of the changes outlined by Twitter todayare meant to expand how much you can say in a single tweet without expanding beyond the 140 character limit thatâs defined Twitter since it launched back in 2006.
Usernames no longer count against the character limit when replying.
Photos, GIFs, videos, polls, and quoted tweets no longer count against the character limit. Thereâs one important caveat: links will count.
Itâs now possible to retweet your own tweets and replies.
Twitter wants people to ditch the â.@usernameâ shortcut to broadcast a reply to everyone. Now, youâd retweet that reply.
Thereâs an important point about the last one, which has caused great amounts of confusion, thanks to Twitterâs confusing wording on how it works. Right now, if you reply to someone on Twitter, that reply is listed in other peopleâs timelines if they follow both you and the person youâre following. If you donât follow one or the other, the reply doesnât show up.
This new rule doesnât change that; itâs Twitter trying to encourage people to retweet replies to make them public, rather than use â.@username.â
If you start a new tweetânot a reply!â with a username, thatâs public, by default. So if you want to keep replies semi-private, make them as a reply.
Itâs confusing, yes, but ultimately a good change for the service.
One of the changes thatâs not outlined in Twitterâs official post, but was buried in a BuzzFeed article, is that itâs now possible to spam up to 50 usernames when replying on Twitter. Campo Santo designer Chris Remo has accurately summarized my reaction to this change: âOh god. Oh my god. Oh no. No no no. Please no. Oh god oh god oh god oh god oh god.â
Itâs already incredibly easy for people to bug you on Twitter; the service encourages this sort of behavior, as a public social network. Granted, my reaction, as someone with more than 150,000 followers, is a different one. Those with only a handful of followers that use Twitter to keep track of news and other goings-on probably arenât dealing with this. (Bless you.)
More to the point, Twitter has an awful track record with mitigating harassment on its service; itâs still a dangerous and uncomfortable place for large swaths of minority groups. This change seems to give Twitterâs worst some useful tools to make it easier to harass users simultaneously.
USERS: we love twitter but it has problems
TWITTER: great we'll fix them
USERS: do you want to know what they are
TWITTER: absolutely not— actioncookbook (@actioncookbook) January 5, 2016
Twitterâs always scaled poorly, and thatâs still true. The more people you interact with, the more who follow you, the worse your experience is. Twitterâs desire to make conversation âeasierâ is often misguided, with unintended consequences that make using Twitter an upsetting slog.
And yet, Twitter is invaluable to my daily life. Iâve met and interacted with people who are now my lifelong friends. Iâve learned about and from disparate life experiences in ways that have benefited my own. Iâve been able to cultivate a robust, interesting community of followers that I can take with me, regardless of where my work is published. Iâve had challenging, enlightening conversations that shifted my worldview.
Thatâs why Twitter is amazing, and it has precious little to do with squeezing in more characters.
Itâs always felt like Twitter doesnât know what to do with its service. That hasnât changed, and like most people, Iâll continue to grumble about the stuff I donât like. And where will I grumble about it? Twitter, of course.
