Twitter briefly changed how @ replies work and users went crazy
Twitter's iOS app experienced a subtle but important change Friday -- the old style of replies, which required placing the "@" character in front of the username of the person you're replying to, was briefly gone, and replaced with the text "replying to" above the tweet.
Twitter quickly reverted the change, explaining on its Support account that it was an "experiment" which "accidentally" went out to all iOS users.
The new approach to replying had some unintended consequences; since the @ replies didn't count against Twitter's 140-character limit, you could add as many as you wanted in one tweet -- and spam all those people in the process.
Twitter explained in September that it's testing this feature with a small subset of users. However, now that it rolled out for everyone on iOS, the users were not impressed.
Don't worry folks, it's over. For now.
Topics Social Media X/Twitter
Stan is a Senior Editor at Mashable, where he has worked since 2007. He's got more battery-powered gadgets and band t-shirts than you. He writes about the next groundbreaking thing. Typically, this is a phone, a coin, or a car. His ultimate goal is to know something about everything.
