Twitter Removes Reply Options – Options are Bad?

Today, Twitter announced that they were making a change to their reply system, which would remove the option to see replies sent out from people you follow to people you do not follow. Basically, if you follow Bob and he sends a message to Bill, you who do not follow, you won’t see the message. This has been the default behavior (I believe) of Twitter for a long time, but you had the option of changing a setting so that you would see those replies anyway. The change was made because they found most people did not want to see those replies. The rest of Twitter who do use that feature, however, seem to be pretty displeased.

I have had Twitter set up to not show me those replies for a while now, because sometimes it really can just cause a lot of noise that you don’t want to bother with. However, if you’re following a smaller number of people, it can be a real boon. Seeing the @replies sent out from someone you follow can help you find new people with similar interests that you can also follow. It is a nice discovery tool. It also lets you keep aware of interesting conversations, even if you only follow one person involved in it – after all, you can always check the profile of the other person involved to get both sides.

While I don’t use the option, I am sad to see it go, and I find it a bit puzzling why it is gone. There is something to be said about not overloading people with too many options (even if I’m not a Gnome user!), but Twitter isn’t packed with options as is, and it is a relatively minor option that provides additional functionality to people who want it.

This is a few interesting lessons to learn due to this situation. First off, removing options that already exist is probably a bad plan, as it won’t really affect anyone who doesn’t use the feature, and just harms those who do. There’s not a lot of benefit to doing that, unless it takes a lot of resources to maintain.

The other thing this points out, I think, is that options are, actually a good thing. Options are only bad when you force them on people en mass. I think having plenty of features is perfectly fine as long as the defaults are solid, people never have to tweak anything if they don’t feel like it, and you separate out basic and advanced options to keep a high level of usability.