It doesn’t matter that if that’s “simpler: — 97$ of users have already decided they don’t want that.

97% is a bigger number than 3%. If Twitter has to choose between 2 interfaces, picking the one that benefits the 97% is a no-brainer.

See, the Internet is computers and people. Sometimes, you actually have to take the people into account.

Problem is, for Twitter, their vocal minority overlaps pretty well with their influencers.

My take on #twitterfail is that the majority of people there thought that @replies as a whole were being removed, didn’t actually know what was being changed, and joined the outrage because of those influencers.

The Twitter lesson has less to do with Facebook Change Protest and more to do with Top Digger Revolt.

Case in point:

“@techcrunch is that really your opinion on the matter?”

“@techcrunch is really rocking this Bon Jovi karaoke track!”

There’s no reliable way to make such a system 100% reproducible in intent while adding language analysis to let a backend system “automagically” determine if its a public mention, or a reply, without actually CLICKING on a reply icon.

It’s not hard here:

If you type “@whoever”, it’s a mention and everyone gets to see it.

If you explicitly click reply, you are replying specifically to that tweet, hence it is a reply.

Done.

You know what this is? Pride. They tried something new, no one liked it, and like you said, they’re half going back. They don’t want to admit they were wrong and just say, “Damn, we fucked up. We’ll revert back to the way it was.”

If I’m wrong and it really is a scalability/engineering issue… wow. Twitter haz problems.

With that option existing, they needed to check which option you had selected and then make a decision accordingly. When one of their geniuses decided this was a big drain on the system, what they decided to do was to remove the option, and instead ‘fix’ it at the least-confusing choice, which is #2.

Of course, I think it sucks, because for the most part, I liked option #3 – even though you’d have to suffer through your occasional long one sided conversations from people who don’t know how to DM, or conversations with people whose profiles are private.

I like TC, I really do, but maybe more of TC’s writers need to pull a Sarah Lacy and get out of the valley for a while. Hitting some local startup events, I’ve seen enough cool things going on in tech to fill TechCrunch for a month, and zero of them have a thing to do with Twitter.