Twitter‘s been in a bit in an uproar lately. They changed the replies policy. The reasoning was that many people did not know that the replies were public. So they hid the replies. I’d like to see who people I’m following talking to so I can stalk, err.. I mean follow them too.
We follow people we can learn from, and if they talk to other people, we feel we can learn from them too. This is common in the software industry (the following part, not the stalking).
Twitter rebounded quickly and said they are now developing a new feature that will do it better. That’s nice. But the issue I’d like to comment on is this: They did something.
It may have upset people, but there they decided to do what they thought was correct at the time. I don’t know how much they deliberated this, but eventually, the made the change. And now they are doing one again. Why? Feedback. They got a lot of it, and now they are changing course.
What would be the alternative? Democratize the Twitter app, so anyone can vote on anything? Keep it that way, at the expense of the less vocal majority (I think they are the majority, I don’t have a real proof) gets confused and leaves? Out of these three options I’d still pick the one they have.
Why? First – they could be right. Maybe it is the right decision, despite all the noise. And if it’s wrong, doing this step makes them now take one in the right direction.
If you don’t do anything, nothing will change. If you want to go from A to B, take action. It may not be that B is where you really want to be. But you can discover this only when you get there.
Take action.
