On 4 Mar, 14:25, TjL <[email protected]> wrote: > There *should* be a way to start a "conversation chain" without > setting an in-reply-to being added where it doesn't belong. That's > where it makes sense that you would type in @NAME by hand. > > Twitter shouldn't be held hostage to "the way it used to be" for a > feature which was clearly broken by indicating a relationship between > two posts when there was none. Neither should they be held hostage to > "Users are too lazy to do it the right way."
As I have attempted to explain to atebits and to others, I AM NOT ADVOCATING TO GO BACK TO THE WAY IT USED TO BE. I am advocating for a *compromise* solution. I *understand* the need for there to be an accurate way to follow conversation chains, and I *like* that the new way allows for this. But the approximate context that the previous method used should *also* NOT be tossed out. If an extra flag is set in addition to the in_reply_to_status_id metadata, then BOTH methods can be used. Clients which want to throw out any non-exact context can accept only that data which includes the "exact" flag, and clients which want as much context as possible can simply ignore the flag. BOTH METHODS CAN BE DONE AT ONCE. > And yes, if their twitter client makes "real" replies too hard, they > should be updated to make it easier or they should fall into disuse. This is just arrogant. This is completely false. When someone wants to reply to me, typing five characters, "@simX" is *far* faster than moving your mouse to target a tiny little reply swoosh. It takes a whole second to move your hand to the mouse, when you can type those 5 characters in under a second if you're a fast typer. Saying that users who refuse to jump through the UI hoops are somehow inferior is lame and condescending. Not only that, but humans often make mistakes and simply forget to target a specific tweet. Losing the context because of simple human error is unnecessary. The @reply syntax was created organically by users. It was not created by Twitter. As such, it represents more of how users actually want to interact with Twitter. That functionality should be preserved AS WELL AS providing a way to accurately follow conversation chains. The mere fact that there are genuine replies that don't have the in_reply_to_status_id metadata set demonstrates that the new interface should not completely replace the old functionality. -- Simone
