In keeping with its time-honored tradition of changing things nobody actually wanted changed, earlier today Twitter unleashed a redesigned reply system. From now on, the handle of the person you’re replying to (“@name”) won’t appear in the reply itself, just in small text above the tweet. This means you get a full 140 characters to devote to your replies. It also means you can add as many people as you want (up to 50) to your reply — affectionately known as a Twitter canoe — because character counts no longer matter.
At best, these changes make it slightly harder to stalk who is replying to whom, since you can no longer immediately see the handle of every user involved. At worst, you’re trapped in a nightmarish reply chain getting spammed by a Twitter egg along with 49 strangers. And while it remains as easy as ever to add people to a canoe — just type their handle into the body of your tweet — removing them requires some new, added steps. If you want to only reply to, say, 12 of the 25 people paddling your Twitter canoe, you have to manually remove the 13 other handles you want gone. (Twitter already seems to have heard our complaints and added a single-click option to remove everyone from a canoe at once. Earlier, as noted by Motherboard, this was not an option.)
Maybe next time Twitter will consider giving users a feature they are actually asking for, or at the very least won’t hate. My request would be upping the character limit on usernames (the full name that appears on a user’s page beneath their profile picture), so I could actually fit my entire given name. Or taking care of the Nazi thing. Either would be fine.
