The Industry Review

Twitter DM Longer than 140 characters

The following is a list of tips, tricks and tidbits of information that can be useful to any user. I think Twitter should have a central resource explaining at least some of these, because not being aware of some can definitely affect user experience (i.e. #8)

 

1. Changing user names: I’ve known several users who wanted to change their user names so that no one could find them. Well, unfortunately, Twitter makes it quite easy to track a user even if they do change their user name.
   
    
   1. If you’ve ever corresponded with the user, by clicking on the “in reply to” you’ll get to the actual message regardless of the user’s new name.
      

   2. If you’ve ever listed the user – and this could be a private (invisible) list as well – the user would still appear in the list regardless of his new name.

    

2. Changing user names #2: the only true way to “start a new life” on Twitter is by opening a new account. Though if the person still “hangs out” with the same crowd he did before, he will be found… there’s no Twitter witness protection program ;-).
   
    

3. Getting out of lists: if someone places a user in a list and he does not wish to be listed, all he needs to do is block the listing user and he’ll be removed from all public/private lists.
   (note that as I mentioned in #1, this is one partial way to escape detection when changing a user name).
   
    
   A while ago one of the eccentric users who took it on themselves to police user activities told me that “I’m being watched from now on” (95% of his tweets to other users were “You’re being watched”. Immediately after he sent it to me, he also sent this to Arnold Schwarzenegger – I said he was eccentric, right?). I chuckled to myself and blocked him. Good luck with that, buddy – let’s see you track all of those without using private lists.
   
    

4. DM mechanism: Unlike what Twitter states, the DM mechanism is not limited to 140 characters. Whether it’s a bug or a feature, I don’t know. As far as I heard, using an external application can enable you to send much longer DMs, though most applications – and the web interface – limit you to 140 characters. This is easily demonstrated by a screenshot of a DM I received some time ago (which appears at the top of this post).
   
    

5. Finding out whether you’ve been blocked: How do you find out whether a user has blocked you without trying to follow them again? Easily: you go to their profile page and see whether you can list them. If you can’t, you’ve been blocked. In addition, you can actually do this en-masse by going to a list, or a user’s followers list, and see whether there are any users you cannot list. All these have blocked you.
   
    

6. Public messages: I’m sure you know that you only see responses to a user if you follow both sides: so if user @a talks to user @b, you’ll see their individual responses if you follow both users a and b. However, one way to make a response public is by adding a dot . before the response, i.e. .@a message. Of course, when you think about it, this really changes the response to a standard tweet, which is of course public, yet this still is a commonly used mechanism for making responses public and usually the dot is used as well.
   
    

7. Number of stored tweets: many users are not aware of this, but the profile page only shows the last 3,000 tweets. If a user wants to be able to view all his tweets, he should use a service like Backupmy which is free and stores all the tweets that have been sent.
   
   Interestingly, it seems Twitter does in fact store all tweets. This is evident by clicking on ‘in response to’ of really old tweets as well as by the favorites section – which often include tweets that have long vanished from one’s profile. I find this a weird design choice on Twitter’s end.
   
    

8. Vanishing DMs: I’m not sure whether this was always the case or was only changed a few months ago: DMs vanish if one of the participants in the correspondence deletes them. This is a very bad design choice, since it is possible to delete a DM before its recipient has seen it! Also, if Twitter has made this choice, why not be consistent and do the same for responses?
   
    

9. Vanishing DMs #2: On the other hand, if a user terminates his account, his DMs are still available.
   
    

10. Number of followers/followees/lists bug: this is a serious bug that has been present for at least several months, and I’m sure almost every user has encountered it. Specifically, the number of followers and/or followees and/or lists one appears in fluctuates: A refresh of the screen changes it, and another refresh may change it back. Usually the difference is by no more than 15, but I’ve seen one user whose follower numbers fluctuated by a 100 (exactly!). Weird bug, and I don’t understand why it is still present after so long since it clearly affects user experience.

     
    I’m sure there are many more of the above I omitted – if you have some suggestions, please let me know!

     

We take this for granted, that social media sites are monitored for unruly behavior. Yes, there are flaws, there are always ways for users to break the rules and get away with it, and sometimes what is perceived a harassment by a person may be (strangely) considered legitimate behavior by social media sites. That being said, the fact is, there is a lot of moderation going on which really enables these sites to continue operating – and we take this for granted.

 
As those who follow me on Twitter must have guessed, this article was inspired by the fact that in the past few days I, and several other people, were consistently harassed on Twitter by a troll. While I don’t think he’s a bad guy, harassment is harassment. Vulgarity should not be tolerated, and if someone does not want to be in touch with you, you have to respect that. I must’ve blocked 8 (at least) of his Twitter users, 3 of his Facebook users and ignored one LinkedIn invite. But this is just the background and not what I wanted to discuss.

 
So assuming sites were not moderated – what would happen? I know the answer to this all to well and will illustrate this with an unpleasant experience I had three years ago.

 
I mentioned a couple of times in previous posts that I used to be very active on a small blog network (“and your blog was #1 for a few months, yes, yes, we heard it” – ok 😉 ). The reason I chose to leave it is because the atmosphere really turned sour. There were two users, one problematic in particular, that took great pleasure in harassing and offending other users. Both of them were highly intelligent and they tended to pick on people they considered inferior (which was almost anyone to them), and sometimes they just picked on people who did things they considered improper behavior (name dropping was something that really, really annoyed them – if you dared mention you met a celebrity, you risked public humiliation). Both of them actually treated me with great respect, so I didn’t have any personal issues with them – except for the fact that it was really hard to watch the way they behaved.

 
However, the site owners and creators – who were active participants in the community – never said a word, despite admitting that these two are “occasionally misbehaving”. What could I do? Only watch.

 
There were very few people who misbehaved like this, but those who did, ruined it for the rest of us. Therefore, I decided to leave, pack my blog and go elsewhere. But due to the addictive nature of such sites (read my article about withdrawal from addictive sites – largely learned through the experiences I’m discussing now), I found this was not so easy.

 
As a result, I found myself occasionally coming back and never truly leaving. However, certain events – which are too long for me to elaborate on – caused me to “publicly declare that the site’s atmosphere is ruined and is not fun for many people anymore”. I listed many activities which these two starred in and some of my best friends on the site were the target of the mentioned harassment. I also listed people who were not my friends but were harassed.

 
In hindsight, it was really naive – even stupid. I think I was expecting everyone to say “yes, you’re so right” and for the two guys to say “what, we didn’t realize it bothers everyone so much, we’ll behave from now on”. Perhaps it’s a result of the circumstances that led me to to make this statement (again, very long story), but I just wasn’t thinking.

 
What did happen is an all-out site war. For about a week there wasn’t a single post in the entire site that hasn’t revolved around this. Another guy joined my side as “the good guys”. Overall, we were winning: about 70% of the community completely agreed with me, and 30% did not (many of these made such incredible conspiracy theories I could never have envisioned… i.e. that I wanted to be the most popular user on the site, so my goal was to get these two guys to leave and “be in charge”. WTH?! – this would never have occurred to me that someone would say this, not in a million years).

 
The reason the war wouldn’t settle even after a week is because the site had no official rules. So at some point both sides – us and them – called for the owners to declare what is right and what is wrong. We didn’t even ask for them to enforce it, just for the community to know. But despite all of us knowing the owners personally, they ignored us, completely. Not even a peep. Both of us – independently – repeatedly asked for intervention, and got no response.

 
At this point one of the “bad guys” started threatening me and the other guy in real life. I won’t elaborate how, but these were threats that only a psychopath would make. Which he was. By this point I actually got a lot of “fan mail” telling me of his various deeds – and he is most definitely a psychopath by clinical standards (I’m not a psychiatrist, but it’s so obvious). Maybe that’s why the site owners didn’t take a stand – fear – but in my opinion, this is no excuse. Taking a stand was their duty to the community they created.

 
This went way too far. Therefore, since I was going to leave anyway, the war wasn’t going to end anytime soon, and most importantly I was shocked by the behavior of the owners, I publicly said my goodbyes, exchanged emails with friends, and left. I only came to visit once 2 years later after one of the site members – a good friend of mine – died of cancer and everyone left a comment as a tribute.

 
I later moved to another site which was based on the same blogging system. That site, however, was actively and aggressively moderated. Even too much. For example, they had a policy that people must use human photos as avatars or no avatars at all. Until this point I never used my real photo (always used pictures), but since this was the standard, I started then – and never stopped.

 
They claimed that this makes the site much more personal – a claim I actually agree with since it did make things more personal. What I think went to far is that they started banning users who even slightly deviated from this policy, i.e. one person had a blurred picture and was banned. Another had a photo of himself upside down – and was banned. And worst, one had a near-realistic drawing of himself (which was the image he used in a real newspaper – the guy was a journalist!) – and he was banned too. They all refused to change their photos and chose instead to leave.

 
Interestingly, the “bad guy” I early mentioned made his appearance here at some point. I was following him from afar, quite certain he’ll make trouble in no time. Which he did. Very quickly he started 3 separate very vocal and rude flame wars with prominent users of the site. Unlike the other site, he was warned by the administrator, warned again, and then banned. It was so nice to see how easy it was to control such a psychopath when there’s the proper system for dealing with it. He threatened these users too, but was mainly treated as a joke by the visitors and not as the “scary person” everyone were afraid of at the other site.

 
What’s the moral of the above stories? I didn’t really intend to create one, except to emphasize a point we all know: law and order need to be maintained.

 
However, I did learned a few valuable lessons:

1. A social media site has to have a clear set of rules and acceptable behaviors, and these have to be actively enforced. If that’s not the case, the site becomes the wild west – anarchy quickly takes over, and people leave.
   
    

2. Too strict rules can also be problematic. They too will make people leave. So at times there’s a fine balance that needs to be handled.
   
    

3. Many people are cowards: I got so many emails privately cheering and encouraging me for my above war, but not only these people did not actively share their feelings with the rest of the site, some even denied that it even bothered them – publicly! Of course, there were plenty of people who weren’t like that, but I was shocked – and disgusted – with the number who did behave this way.
   
    

4. Sometimes being the hero is really stupid. I honestly thought everyone would see that what I wrote had pure motivations, but considering the conspiracy theories some users made about me (that I mentioned above), I really learned a valuable lesson here.
   
    

5. Most important: if a site has no rules & no moderation (something I have not seen in any of the popular social media sites), stay away from it – it’s not worth it.