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Comment by atonse | Hacker News Reader

Am I misunderstanding this statement?

> New Tweets that begin with a username will reach all your followers. (That means you’ll no longer have to use the ”.@” convention, which people currently use to broadcast Tweets broadly.) If you want a reply to be seen by all your followers, you will be able to Retweet it to signal that you intend for it to be viewed more broadly.

What if I don't want a reply to be broadcast in everyone's feed? (Not that it's private, but it's just not relevant and usually lacks context). Or are they saying that if you want it shown to everyone, retweet it and it'll show up to everyone?

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If you are replying to a tweet, they won't show up for everyone. This only applies when composing a new tweet from scratch that starts with an @name (and behind the scenes does not contain an "in_reply_to", which if you want to broadcast to everyone, can now be retweeted).

How can it tell? This must use some out-of-band data to figure out whether it's a "new" tweet or a "reply"?

Is that compatible with API consumers or the SMS interface? (Or are these both dead?)

Twitter have been largely ignoring SMS for years...

If you reply via an app or their website, they attach the id of the tweet you are replying to in their database. This is how they can show you a conversation timeline.

Note btw that their new "retweet with a comment" system breaks said timeline tracking...

The API can easily do this, and AFAIK any Twitter client you're likely to run into already does this. The SMS interface doesn't appear to support this, though.

in_reply_to no?

Ah makes sense, thanks.

I had the same confusion. I was missing the fact that there are apparently 3 separate things.

  1) "new" tweets - reach all followers
  2) replies - not seen by followers
  3) retweets - not sure if these are "new" tweets, but they also reach all followers

Maybe there are other kinds of tweets also. I couldn't make any sense of this announcement until I realized that replies are not "new" tweets.

Vanilla retweets only show up on your followers' timelines if their TL doesn't already contain the tweet. The idea is that you shouldn't see the same tweet twice. (There is a timeout, I don't know how long it is)

Quote retweets do what you'd expect, though.

> Quote retweets do what you'd expect

I hope you meant the proverbial "you". Personally, I can't find a reason to expect any particular behavior in that case. I've never been able to figure twitter out.

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