I don't know why people are complaining, because they have the same behavior as before, if they want, and something new that's useful beyond just being an echo chamber (the metrics as you mentioned). You are right about the inconsistency problems, particularly between clients, but I think this will get worked out as clients are updated to fully take advantage of the new features. Clients that don't update will just lose users.

I don't know why people are complaining, because they have the same behavior as before, if they want, and something new that's useful beyond just being an echo chamber (the metrics as you mentioned). You are right about the inconsistency problems, particularly between clients, but I think this will get worked out as clients are updated to fully take advantage of the new features. Clients that don't update will just lose users.

I've never understood the retweet thing. Back when it started, you had the social media crowd who seemed to spend all day in TweetDeck pushing the RT button like some kind of robotic army of Pavlovian dogs – and with all the creativity, ingenuity and imagination of a chicken trained to push buttons repeatedly to get food pellets. Why not, err, come up with something to say for yourself? Imagine going to a dinner party where nobody says anything of their own accord – nobody expresses any opinions or ideas of their own, but just mindlessly repeats other people's statements. That was Twitter for a while. That Twitter have introduced a feature that might make it possible to filter out that shit is one of the best things they did this year.

This is a serious problem for Twitter clients, because – afaik – it's almost impossible to create a list of retweets of your own tweets via the retweet API calls. You'd quickly run out of API calls.