The tweet to nowhere: protected replies
On Twitter, you can set your account to “protected” to make your tweets private. In this mode, only people you approve can see your tweets. Interestingly, this restriction now also applies to @replies and @mentions1.
I don’t generally follow anybody who has a private Twitter account, mostly on principle. I can’t evaluate what they write or how often they write it, so I just let them enjoy their privacy. It had never really occurred to me how isolated these users are though – they can’t be retweeted, and the people they mention often can’t respond to what they’re saying.
So I was weirded out yesterday when I was notified that two different people were @replying me that I couldn’t see:
- @bishnu_b replied to one of my comments but I couldn’t tell. I was tipped off by a public reply to that reply.
- @canadiankelli asked me a question but I couldn’t tell. I was tipped off by my wife asking me why I didn’t respond.
I love chatting with people on Twitter, so it was disturbing to me that people were trying to contact me and getting a wall of silence. If this is happening to me, it’s happening on a huge scale to various celebrities and company accounts:
- I should join Twitter to interact with people.
- An option to make my account private? Seems prudent.
- Hey, there’s this @reply thing. “@my_friend Hey, let’s go for dinner!”
- Nice, I got a response to my message.
- I need to reach out to somebody I follow. “@support I have a problem, everything is broken!”
- What jerks, they never responded to my message.
This is horrible, since there is no feedback to the user that their messages are going into a black hole. Effectively nobody sees the message, and the user just resents being ignored. Clearly this is a problem.
Solution #1: Show @replies from private accounts
Obviously Twitter made this decision for privacy reasons – an engineer there challenged me on this issue, saying the user set their account to private for a reason, so it should stay that way. In general, erring on the side of privacy is a good call. Still, I would argue that virtually no users will @reply somebody intending it to be hidden from that person – in users’ minds, it is a directed communication.
Solution #2: Warn users that their @replies are going nowhere
Anybody would agree that a warning here is better than nothing. This is just a question of the design and engineering bandwidth to add the warning for a small subset of users. I would say that this is the least Twitter can do – a little “Warning: @bieber cannot see this message” flag.
Solution #3: Get rid of private accounts
I’m sure some at Twitter would love to just do away with protected accounts, but it’s probably not feasible for political reasons. Honestly though, what value are people getting out of posting on Twitter over Facebook if they can’t @reply most of the people they follow and can’t be retweeted? To me, the entire beauty of Twitter is the ability to follow whoever you fancy following, and the ability for others to do the same to you – coupled with mechanisms like retweets and @replies for broadening the group of people you’re communicating with.
Whatever path Twitter takes, I think they need to do something – as things stand, a lot of people are getting the cold shoulder for reasons they don’t understand.
- I’ve been told that you used to be able to see your @replies from private accounts, implying this is a recent change. [↩]
Mar 28 2012
5:33 pm
I use twitter essentially because my iPhone has it integrated, and it spans both my social networks. It lets me also connect with people I vaguely know (but may not want on my facebook). In this I can share thoughts with them, and friends, across social networks without necessarily displaying my opinions, and geographic location to the entire world. I also have a popular username (coreyb) so I get a lot of @coreyb’s that aren’t for me – privacy helps avoid that.
For this reason, and a few more, I feel the private functionality is useful. I doubt I would use twitter in the same way if it didn’t have the option.
Mar 28 2012
5:36 pm
How do you share your thoughts with people you barely know though? Do you find a lot of people you barely know follow you back even though your account is private?
Mar 28 2012
10:10 pm
That is the very reason I set mine from private to public (when I figured that my replies/comments to people who weren’t following me were not being seen).
They really should have made this clearer at the time.
Mar 28 2012
11:06 pm
CAUTION: After reading this, some imaginative but unintelligent troll may create a private twitter account devoted entirely to sending you messages that you can’t see and don’t know exist.
YOU WOULD NEVER KNOW.
Mar 28 2012
11:19 pm
Curtis, you’re my favourite.
Mar 29 2012
6:49 pm
I have a number of people that ask to follow, that I don’t permit… Because I don’t know or care about them :|
May 4 2012
1:54 pm
Great article with recos. Great comments. If nothing else changes, solution 2 should be a must. Show warnings. From the comments, agree that the explanation could be better, especially for a newbie just setting up an account. Its easy to select private, hastily, without understanding eager to tweet I am new to twitter and signed up to enter a contest. Contest was based on creative answers and of course, I thought mine could have be better than some of the eventual winners. Wasn’t able to see my own tweets. How frustrating is this, feeling ignored. Come to find out that all this time I have been tweeting to Nowhere. I should use this as my own personal online diary. lol
Like you mention, how many others are happily, and unknowingly tweeting to nowhere, and no one but themselves.
Jul 4 2012
10:15 pm
I agree with solution 1. I don’t think it’s fair to remove the ability to remain private (or to question the validity in reasons behind why one elects to make their account private), but I certainly agree that someone who directly @mentions someone they are not following would assume, for the purpose of that tweet only, that they’ve grant permission for the @mentioned person to view that tweets content. I find it frustrating to think that I cannot interact with people I have not granted permission to follow me (or have chosen not to follow me, but still have interactions on occasion).
There needs to be more flexibility in allowing the user to control their level of privacy and comfort. Whilst some people probably love this cocoon of isolation, others like me would prefer to have the option to be private, but only to certain extents. Twitter is a social service, after all.
Sep 10 2012
12:12 am
I’m new to twitter and I thought that twitter’s privacy policy would at least be like fb and myspace settings. I would like to keep my Twitter private But I would like for someone to be able to send me a private message. I mean you can follow someone but to contact them to get them to follow you, you can’t! They have to be already following for you to even send them a direct message. How lame is that??? Twitter wants you to make your profile public. Protecting your tweets make sense nowadays with this whole internet free speech thing. But not too long ago, some website gathered a whole heap of twitter accounts tweets and posted them for everyone to see. It had to do with Obama and their racist remarks that was said about him. Even twitter posted the link in the news feed. Wow, starting to think twitter not even worth it. But it is nice to tweet whatever that is on your mind…
Jan 30 2013
9:58 am
Hi, thanks for explaining about what happens to the @Mentions and @Replies that are SENT from Private Accounts. What I’d like to know now is, what are the rules for private accounts RECEIVING Tweets from public accounts that don’t follow them?
For instance:
1) If you have a private account, can you see @Mentions / @Replies addressed to you from public accounts that don’t follow you?
2) If not, can you manually Search for @Mentions / @Replies addressed to your private account from public accounts that don’t follow you?
I’d like to open a public Twitter account under a pen-name, so im thinking about using a private account to correspond with people under my real name.
I’d like to use Twitter as a Business Tool, and open a public account under a pen-name so I can fully communicate with my followers. However, if people wish to communicate with the real me for business purposes, I’d like to direct them towards a private Twitter account that I have full control over. The people who I allow to follow my private account will come from the followers of my public account, but im still researching the whole thing, and I can’t find answers to my 2 questions anywhere! Hopefully you can help (and I can contribute to your discussion!)
Thanks.
Feb 8 2013
1:57 pm
I think you should be able to send a tweet to someone you follow that doesn’t follow you in reply to their tweet. It used to be that way. Didn’t know they changed it. Didn’t know tweet was going nowhere omg!