Here’s the background: like the @reply convention, ReTweeting emerged organically from Twitter’s users. Now Twitter is working to codify the RT behavior in a way that feels broken. For more background see Ev Williams on why RT works the way it does, this quite good piece by Alex Schleber on why the new RT doesn’t work, and this too-long-but-kinda-worth-reading piece from TechCrunch.
For the record, Twitter is screwing this up, and here’s why:
- Alex nails it: You should only see avatars of Twitter users you follow. There are some fundamental rules of a system that can’t be changed without ruining the system, and this feels like one of them.
- You know what’s going to happen; some people will use the new official RT feature, some will still do manual RTs. Not only will the “problem” of RTs not be solved, but our Twitter streams will be twice as cluttered.
- This messes up third party clients. Twitter client developers will have to design, build, and support a feature that users don’t want, even as they take away RT buttons we’re used to (or clutter up precious iPhone screen real estate with buttons for “RT classic” and “RT new”).
- For me this is a big one: why is Twitter fooling with RTs, when they have more pressing problems like constantly dropped AJAX calls, spam bots, a search engine with amnesia, useless favorites, and still broken @replies?
Broken @replies cause more noise and confusion than RTs ever have. Even after all these months users still don’t have a clear grasp of who sees replies. Meanwhile everyone tries to recreate the old functionality with a jumble of dots, R’s, and asterisk prefixes that cut conversation threads, all of which serves to break replies even worse.