We would be happy to provide feedback in advance next time. - Louis Gray

Thank goodness you responded when you did - the frothy mob outside was about finished building the gallows! - Brett Kelly

at the rate that #fixreplies tweets are coming down the pipe they'd be nuts to not re-think their decision and/or explanation - Chris Heath

Nice to know you're listening! - Michael Fidler

You should ask for people's thoughts first. - Michael McKean

I reckon removing the feature was a good things. Has left holes though, that probably shoulda been filled first. - Tim

Louis: sorry, until Twitter fixes how it treats early adopters I'm not giving Twitter free consulting. Only suckers would do that. We helped build Twitter and then it stabs us in the back. That's not making me willing to provide free consulting. Don't know why you'd do that. - Robert Scoble

I volunteer to be your community manager for a month free. If I'm effective at communicating ahead of swarms like this, you can hire me and pay me retroactively. Because seriously? You really need someone to communicate with your users in real time. - Karoli

I hope "considering alternatives" is a euphemism for "we'll have it back right stat, sorry!" - Jandy

@scobleizer; "stabs us in the back" A bit over the top perhaps? - Jordan Brock

Jordon: it absolutely is NOT over the top. When they recommend someone who has only been on Twitter a week or two as a recommended follower they are stabbing users who put a lot more time into the service directly in the back. I have about 1,000 days on Twitter and have put thousands of hours into the service. The way Twitter treats its users is deplorable. - Robert Scoble

Jordan, Mr. Scoble has a propensity for the dramatic. :) - Brett Kelly

Well since it was just a "small setting update" the simplest alternative should be to just undo the change, right? - Ken Sheppardson

Brett: when you put thousands of hours into something and you get stabbed in the back by the owners of that thing you see how it feels. - Robert Scoble

In the meantime, Twitter can get the celebrities to help out with its community problems. I'm not working for free and anyone who does for a company that stabs its users in the back is a sucker. - Robert Scoble

Robert, I can offer my services for free all day to Twitter. I know they won't take me up on it as they aren't interested in what I have to say and their track record proves that. - Louis Gray

I'm really curious to know what kind of stats that were tracked to make this decision. Both @al3x and @dougw are hinting that there wasn't a significant number of people "using this feature", which I am extremely skeptical of. Would tracking the number of times I click out to a profile that I'm not following be enough? It is impossible for them to track whether I personally received value from a tweet even if I didn't click through, right? - Lee Adkins

"The way Twitter treats its users is deplorable" What other instances justify this statement? - Angus Burton

@ev Don't you have more important things to focus on? ie., affiliate marketers who don't disclose what they're doing, follow bots, and all of the spam and manipulation that's ruining twitter?. - Michael Fidler

Louis, I think @ev is listening to you and other Internet celebs, but not nobodies like me. - Vinko

Vinko, I'm no Internet celebrity, and I don't believe I've been addressed by him ever, so he has an odd way of "listening". - Louis Gray

It's an echo chamber - dedlam

You can't go asking your customers about every checkbox and option. Knowing which is what makes a good decision maker. - Ryan Stanley

Sure you can, when it's a feature change that enough users expect to have. It's not disabling a checkbox, it's disabling community discovery. - Karoli

Karoli, here here!! - Vinko

Twitter is clearly listening, and responding quickly and in public. Now, they need to roll back the change - Bob Morris (polizeros)

Twitter knows all the geeks moved to FF. I doubt Oprah considers it a feature change. - Ryan Stanley

wow what a conversation. - Dustin

+1 to dedlam :) - Jordan Brock

Twitter will "consider alternatives" until #fixreplies starts trending back down, which will happen over the next 24 hrs or so. Then they'll look to see if there's any dip in the user number or sign-up rates. There won't be, as nobody's actually willing to leave Twitter over this and new users who've accepted the default setting don't know this option was there, so this will be the last word on the subject you'll see from ev. - Ken Sheppardson

Ken, that's true today and not true in the future. Twitter's continued decision to ignore user feedback and input and make arbitrary decisions will ultimately result in someone creating the next shiny thing. It happened with other services/sites and it will again. - Karoli

Karoli: That'll happen either way. - Ken Sheppardson

There must be a strategy around this, right? They wouldn't just arbitrarily do this. What would be the next feature they implement to make this redundant? - Gregg Scott

Hmm. So, Ev is "Reading people's thoughts." wouldn't it be better if he talked and listened. - Michael Markman

Michael: Thought reading must be something they're testing internally. Probably part of Twitter Pro. - Ken Sheppardson

Could be the move that pushes more people over the FF wall. I've not considered this move until now, but now..... - Debi Jones

@scobleizer, i thought the point of using twitter was because you want to not because you want fame and a pat on the back from evan for "helping". shame on you, that's the biggest douchery i've heard in quite some time. - Snipergirl

Leather is an astute reader! :-) - Robert Scoble

Snipergirl: that's BS. If you are in the media business the size of your audience allows you to build a business. Before the recommended follower list Mashable, GigaOm, and TechCrunch had smaller audiences than I did on Twitter. Now they have far bigger ones and people who don't do many tweets at all are rewarded while the rest of us suckers are left in the back of the bus. If I just wanted to share information I have lots of choices of where to do that and, in fact, for the past year have been choosing to use friendfeed. - Robert Scoble

The simple alternative is to make is a user preference. Even better would be groups, and then to apply said preference to groups. - Barney Craggs

@scobleizer if it's a business to you then vote with your feet and go to a different service and stop whining about evan not paying you enough attention! - Snipergirl

Snipergirl: that's exactly what I've done. But, sorry, I've put thousands of hours in and 904 days into Twitter. When a service treats someone who has put far less work into it better than me, I deserve to whine a little bit and anyone who says I don't isn't worth listening to. Let's put it this way. I see on LinkedIn that you are a hospital worker. What if you put in the time, do a great job, and then get passed over for a promotion by someone who hasn't done nearly the work you have. Wouldn't you complain? - Robert Scoble

Not entirely sure I agree with Robert, but I'll say this: it is incredibly frustrating when sites you use as intensely as Facebook and Twitter ignore the intelligent users. I won't say intelligent = early adopters, and I won't even say that it precludes the celebrities, but it is extremely tiring offering "feedback" when you're treated as just one voice. Clearly, CEO's are out of touch and don't understand us; yet, running a [sufficiently large] site by total democracy trends towards the stupid. #fixreplies - tollie williams

Matt: I get what you're trying to say, but, here's another way to look at it. Twitter has signaled to the world that there's no way you'll ever been seen as a "top tier" person. Take me out of it. No matter how many hours you spend, no matter how popular you'll get, you won't be treated the same way as one of their personal friends and/or celebrities that they want to feature. To me that sucks. It is not a meritocracy. It's a closed society and that's everything I work against. - Robert Scoble

The real problem is like this: Twitter was made for broadcasting and was never meant to be a convesational platform. Even friendfeed does the comments half baked. There are no comments for comments. - ThinkEzy

The only feedback users contribute (that matters) is what they buy or use. If you don't like Twitter, leave. - Jason Nunnelley

@Gattoo seriously, wouldn't this conversation be a LOT easier with threading and a respond feature? - Jason Nunnelley

I don't know about meritocracies or closed societies, but i do know that the main way I find new people to follow on twitter is by seeing who the people I already follow are talking to...and if they say something of interest to me in a reply to them, I want to check that person out. If all I see are replies to people I already follow, I won't find anyone knew unless I pay much closer attention to the followFriday stuff (which I usually don't because any more I think it is a way to give props to friends rather than point out really good people to follow). - Shawna Benson

Gattoo: I disagree with that at least in part. The thing that always excited me about this media is that it's two way. You talk, I respond. But Twitter has biased its business toward the serving of celebrities who mostly use Twitter to broadcast and less to those who try to use it to have conversations with people. That's their right. It's my right to whine about it, though. :-) - Robert Scoble

Shawna: yup. I think Twitter wants to push people like you to use search instead of the "@ replies" tab. - Robert Scoble

Robert: that's a problem -- why would I search on something I don't even know to search for unless someone mentions it? Let's say person A tells person B something about daffodils and I find that interesting enough to go check out person B and start following them based on who they are, who they talk to, etc. Now, 'daffodils' aren't normally something I go randomly searching for info for. This is the difference between human beings reacted in real time to conversations (like at a dinner party) and sitting on a giant game of telephone. - Shawna Benson

@scobleizer It's possible you give them far too much credit. I doubt they've any plan beyond limiting feed size. - Jason Nunnelley

Shawna: I mean you can search for someone who uses your name. I do that on Seesmic Desktop and here on friendfeed and it regularly catches people who both use @scobleizer as well as people who just say "scoble" etc. Then I can go off and check them out, just the same as if I used the @mentions page. - Robert Scoble

Jason: you're right. Twitter's team sure seems like they don't think things out and take the easy road most times. The recommended follower list is just one example of that. They could have done something really magical, but instead they did something half assed. They should have just hired Guy Kawasaki to do an AllTop page for it. That would have been better than what we got. - Robert Scoble

"we've learned most people want to see when someone they follow replies to another person they follow [...] [h]owever, receiving one-sided fragments via replies sent to folks you don't follow in your timeline is undesirable" so despite what we apparently learned that people want we've decided to scrap it anyway. Interesting use of the word "learned" there. - Mark H

Twitter made a mistake by removing this option whatsoever and they have to revert back. We have brains to decide what we do when we have an option! - Jacque from twhirl

The simple way of looking at it for me seems to be- when they say it's what most people are telling them to do, it's actually them telling most people what to do. - Iain Baker

Scoble: You deserve a couple hundred thousand followers, for sure. I joined Twitter bc I read a post you wrote in '07. I hadn't looked at your follower count in a while; figured for sure you had at least been rotated in Suggest Users by now. That just makes me dislike the Suggested Users crap even more. ... The question here, I guess, is: did you do something so bad that Twitter/Ev/Jack/Biz can not forgive you? - john erik metcalf

Scoble: Actually, even if you did, it would still be bullshit. What is this, Texas politics? Good ol' boy system. They need to figure out a better way, obviously things are getting very unequal. - john erik metcalf

I don't know, Scoble, I'm going to take a different angle. Did Ev ever ask you to spend "thousands of hours" and 900+ days on Twitter? If so, then I'd say you've got a gripe. Otherwise, you did it voluntarily for your benefit, and frankly, Ev doesn't owe you anything; he provided a service for free, you used the hell out of it (profiting along the way, I don't doubt). It sounds like entitlement syndrome to me. Now, to flip-flop a little, I'm also an early adopter type like you and Leo, so I totally understand being let down when something, especially a community, you've help build goes a direction you don't agree with or like. But again, no one forced you and you didn't even have to pay, so I'm having a hard time with the histrionics. However, given the replies here and the traffic you'll generate from here, I think you'll be fine ;-) - Bob M. Montgomery

I already miss what my followees are saying to other people. I've been using Tweetree for awhile now, because it would display the tweet to which my followee is replying (unless it was a protected tweet). With the new change, that aspect doesn't work, and Tweetree's entire platform is practically destroyed... - Qrystal MqKenzie

If there's one good thing about this, it's that I can probably follow more people: I used to not follow someone if all they do is reply to people without giving context of what they're talking about. Maybe they'll make it so the visibility of @replies to people I'm not following is set on a per-user basis... which would be great, because some of my followees were SO GOOD at giving context, it's a major loss to no longer be able to see their @replies to people I don't follow! - Qrystal MqKenzie

Qrystal: I feel the same way, except now it's a huge hassle for me to actually find all the people I should be following. - Guan Yang

Bryan, this is about a setting being removed that was not the default setting. If you had changed the default setting to this setting you would see every tweet by the people you were following (the default was and still is to hide the @'s to people you're not following). The change is now there is no choice that setting has been removed and anyone who set that setting is now back to the default (which it seems you've always been on). - Chris Heath

I don't want to have to follow a bunch of people just so I can follow a topic to it's close. Am hoping this was more about saving downtime. This is how Plurk etc will find it's market. Maybe this will clear the chaff and all the real people can take the reins again! - Elia Penn from Nambu

@scobleizer please clarify: are you saying that "stab in the back" = "not being on the recommended list"? - Michael Markman

I'm still trying to figure out why Scoble is so upset. While it's noble for him to have helped pioneer the service and offer input on making it better, I don't see how that equates to Twitter somehow owing him any type of allegiance. Also, people seem to have forgotten that Twitter is an independent entity, responsible only to its investors (ultimately) and, as such, they are free to make decisions about the behavior and capability of their product. If people are really *that* up in arms about them taking actions like this, perhaps they ought to take their business elsewhere. And by "business", I mean "use of a product from which they derive value and for which they pay exactly nothing." - Brett Kelly

@Brett your suggestion that people go elsewhere to find a similar Twitter service is what makes the free market so interesting and exciting. While Twitter cannot be everything to everyone, every decision Twitter makes affects their future success. Look at what happened to MySpace and the rise of Facebook or Ford compared to Honda. If Twitter leaves enough room, someone else will come and provide a service that appeals to the masses more often. Is Twitter making a grave mistake by removing @replies to strangers? I don't know but I'm sure time will tell. - Damond Nollan from email

Michael: no. He's said in the past that he would asked to be removed if he was placed on the list. Thought I can see Scoble's frustration, I agree with Brett on this one. - Angus Burton

I haven't read this thread in its entirety, so I apologize in advance if I repeat anyone else's position. Two thoughts: 1) If the powers that be at Twitter were simply concerned with reducing the noise in our streams, why not simply change the default setting of the @ replies to not show all, while keeping the option available? Instead, they change the default behavior and remove the option, altogether. Stupid move, Twitter. 2) How lucky we are that we can spend so much energy and time focusing on such a relatively trivial event. I understand Scoble et. al.'s frustration, but I do not understand any of the hysteria I am witnessing. - Phil Essing

I wonder if Ev has made it over to friendfeed to read this. I can see Robert's points. It would have been cool if more 'meritorious' tweeps were added to the recommendeds. But when the average non-techie person signs up to Twitter they probably find it more attractive to follow P-Diddy and Ellen than to follow someone they've never heard of, regardless of how much valuable content they've added to the service. That being said, Twitter needs to adjust they're listening ears. - Jesse Newhart

Phil: that was the setting. It used to be an option to turn on all replies from friends, now there are not at reply options at all. If you had made the settings change, you're back to the default. - Chris Heath

Jesse: I have to suggest that the average person would probably prefer to follow someone that actually shares their interests, and beliefs, likes and dislikes. Thus the whole recommended users list on any site is bullshit, and completely worthless. In the absence of a personally worthwhile recommendation, the average non-tech would probably prefer to follow typical pop stars (Brittney, oprah, CNN etc), but could certainly give a damn about the likes of aplusk. And while I think that early adopters like Robert should reap something of the rewards of the success of a company that they've supported with their time, energy, and contacts, I'm certainly not sure that recommending them to other users is the right way. BUT, in the face of the stupid recommendations that Twitter is making for people who haven't had anything to do with building twitter to the point that someone like oprah would give a damn about it, I think its certainly unfair to leave the tech-oriented early adopters out of the list. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Phil: The network I've built since 2007 was largely built exactly with the optional feature that they just removed. I don't mean to sound hysterical or overly dramatic, but the change eliminated something that was fundamental to how I used twitter. It is a free service, they can do as they see fit, it's just a less useful free service to me than it once was. - motownmutt

All the discussion here on FF is neat... but should it be over here too/instead? http://getsatisfaction.com/twitter... (personally, I won't be asking for the 'replies' to come back but... to each their own) - Jay Cuthrell

Jay: I find that Getsatisfaction.com never lives up to its name. I can't think of an issue I've posted or looked into where the company in question posted something. I've found several companies who reirect all their support questions to there, apparently as a convenient black hole. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Brett: Twitter being a free service and held by private investors do not make it immune to the desires of its user base which are the source of its (theoretical) future earnings potential. The less it chooses to work with its user base, and the more it makes decisions that alienate them, the more likely it it that they bail (as HUGE numbers already do withing 30,60,90days of account creation). The more users that bail, the less there is to a) sell to advertisers b) sell to an acquiring company. Yes, they're private and free, free to drive their business into the ground if they wish. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Rob: There are 11 members of Twitter on GetSatisfaction and < 60,000 customers in the system. So, not perfect but it is a trending area and support does read things there. As a side note, that area has over 10,000 support topics... imagine the insanity of a phone support IVR menu that would take 12 hours to delineate all those "issues" :-) - Jay Cuthrell

Jay: No one from twitter support supports a damn thing, unless you're oprah, or brittney or aplusk. Not on getsatisfaction and not anywhere. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Jay: I have never seen anyone from any company answer any question about anything on getsatisfaction.com. This includes WAY more companies that I've looked into than twitter. I never expected anyone from twitter to answer, but I've sure as hell expected someone from ping.fm to answer when that's where their support link took me, - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Update from Twitter - "...we're making a change such that any updates beginning with @username (that are not explicitly created by clicking on the reply icon) will be seen by everyone following that account. This will bring back some serendipity and discovery and we can do this very soon" And they've started designing a new feature which will "give folks far more control over what they see from the accounts they follow. This will be a per-user setting and it will take a bit longer to put together but not too long and we're already working on it." http://bit.ly/SSanc - Sharon McPherson

Rob: I'm not trying to change your mind... just to give you an idea of the scope of what "support" would entail. Of the 11 Twitter employees on GetSatisfaction they have collectively produced 1045 responses as of the count today on their staff page. - Jay Cuthrell

When I last looked their last response had been over three months prior to the date i was looking. I would welcome my mind being changed, but you're trying to change it on two subjects I don't have much faith in a) twitter support in general, and b) getsatisfaction's overall effectiveness. Links may change my mind. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Chris Heath: It seems I wrongly assumed that the @ replies were set to all by default, likely because I chose that setting a long time ago. Thanks. However, that truly begs the question as to why the folks at Twitter decided to remove the option. - Phil Essing

motownmutt: Like I said, I do understand the frustration caused by this feature removal, a frustration which I share. That being said, I'm not going to lose any sleep as a result. - Phil Essing

i'm going to say this fully knowing the fan boy charges i will open myself up to - u can see how concerned i am about that possibility (yawn) - from my perspective scoble has a valid point (Louis is also welcome to offer help to a service he values btw) - about this time last year a myriad of similar conversations were taking place here as twitter crashed MULTIPLE times a day - i cant overstate the frequency of these failures, a fraction of the amount would have (and has) buried countless other startups for good - what allowed twitter to survive? people like scoble and louis who caused people like me to stick around because they stuck around. Twitter has never bothered to communicate w their most dedicated users (or any of their users for that matter) in a way that shows they value them the slightest - its always been that way - Marco(aureliusmaximus)

I am actually fine with the change because one can always go the persons page to find who he/she has replied to and it makes your page less cluttered. There is always some trade off but i am fine. I am waiting for more options from twitter in the future. - Ashish

Funny take on this - http://cli.gs/dumb - Brian Kelley

I love the twitter product, but am growing more disgusted by the twitter management team. There is zero user input solicitation and this latest event #fixreplies is a classic mistake of product mgrs who fail to engage their customer base to get valuable feedback on the design prior to go live; instead, twitter mgmt is releasing features that are not vetting by their user base - huge mistake. This actually is starting to look more and more like an elitist exec team that doesn't care about user input. If that keeps up, users will migrate to another service, like FriendFeed, which is way more robust and feature rich, plus the management team has their heads' screwed on right and truly cares about user input on features. In fact, they use their own product to receive FF "feedback" and they act on it quickly! Kudos to FF and lesson to be learned by twitter - Susan Beebe

waves at Evan Williams. Hey Ev! - Thomas Hawk

Evan, perhaps with the next major functional change you might consider inviting ideas of your users; a good example of how this can work is presented by SalesForce.com: 'Idea Exchange' http://ideas.salesforce.com/ (no suprise SalesForce.com is good in gathering and using feedback from their customers; being a CRM company ;-) ) - Jeroen De Miranda

Scoble, you are a follow-blocker, and as such, you laid the groundwork for the devs putting in this nerf. There are quite a few thin-skinned A-listers who hate seeing back-talk in the @ tabs. this accommodated their wailing. It's wrong and should be put back. People who are vain enough to want to broadcast to followers have to accept that they will hear from the public, and often critically. Otherwise, go on a private AIM or FB chat. - Prokofy Neva

Prokofy: bullshit. If you are a jerk you don't deserve to mess up my experience. You can keep commenting on your own place and I'll still see it anyway. Everyone I know searches on their last name. But I absolutely won't back down from your bullying and change my opinions. I will keep blocking people who are jerks and who are spammers. That's the only way we can keep our community from destroying itself over time. You are NOT entitled to get in my face, sorry. - Robert Scoble

well, this whole conversation could never have happened on Twitter. I do appreciate the attention and awareness of the entire Friendfeed team, but for me the essential feature is the threaded comments. - Peter Efland