Earlier, I tweeted:
Seriously. Everyone that keeps adding a period or brackets when you @ someone so it shows up in my timeline. It’s dumb and I hate it!
Some people weren’t quite sure what I was talking about so let’s break down how replies work. Oh I’m sorry “mentions” is what it’s called now. I’m not in the habit of calling it “mentions” but it makes sense given how the system is setup now. Anyway, before the #FixReplies debacle last month, there was a preference on Twitter Settings that gave you control of what you saw in the timeline.
- You would see everyone’s tweets that you follow. You follow 500 people and every single tweet they make will show up on Twitter.com or your favorite Twitter application.
- The second way was to only show tweets from people you follow that don’t contain replies. Basically, I would only see tweets from people if the tweet DOESN’T start with a reply (@johnsmith…) wouldn’t show up. However, an @JohnSmith somewhere in the tweet didn’t affect this rule. It was only tweets that started with an @.
- The last setting showed replies from people you followed ONLY if you’re following the person they’re replying too.
The third option was my favorite because I like seeing people I mutually follow interacting with other people I follow. Twitter added this around 6 months ago (guessing) and the preference was actually removed. You can read more about it here on this Mashable Post.
Lately, people are getting around this feature. My preference still remains that I don’t see anyone’s replies IF they’re replying to someone I don’t follow. Now people are getting around this setting and it clogs up my stream making Twitter less useful for finding information. Here’s how you can beat the filter and annoy the hell out of your friends who don’t want to see all of your replies to other people.
- Put a period before your reply. The person you’re replying to still sees it and so do ALL of your followers. .@JohnSmith
- Put brackets around the person’s name you’re replying to [@JohnSmith]
- Put quotes around your reply “@JohnSmith”
Basically any punctuation character will work to defeat Twitter’s system. Honestly, it’s annoying to those of us that specifically told Twitter that we don’t want to see your replies and maybe it’s something Twitter will fix soon. For now, I’ll just have to un-follow people that do it too often.