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Probably half the people I follow on Twitter are folks I found via replies my friends were making that I wouldn't see with the current way of things.

I've followed a lot fewer people since the change hiding @replies to people I don't also follow was made, and that rather bums me out.

In my experience, the respectful way to do this is to draft a public tweet that makes sense out of context and (cc @whoever) at the end.

I think the point is that it isn't usually a reply. ".@SomeUser just totally nailed the presentation!" for tedious example. It's just tweeting a sentence that starts with someone's name.

Yes, but if you write that out, it will show up, because it's not a reply. It's only when you hit "reply" and post something that isn't really a reply that the behaviour breaks down.

I get that, but what if there's a discussion you would care about, but they used .@ so you can't follow the thread without scanning and trying to match up timestamps? I'd rather err on the side of allowing tweeters to do something potentially annoying than preventing them from doing something useful.