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Home / Tech  / TL;DR: Twitter’s new rules #newtwitter

TL;DR: Twitter’s new rules #newtwitter

Twitter, one of the miracle, golden, glitter-sparkled unicorns of post-2000-bubble Silicon Valley, is struggling to grow beyond the back pat/stab ouroboros of journalists, celebrities and ‘influencers’ that are its core audience (myself included). So it’s trying everything it possibly can to make it more fun, intuitive and inclusive, including changing the rules as follows:

Tweets that begin with someone’s name will appear in your follower’s feeds, even if your followers don’t follow the user you are tweeting at/about

So, if I begin a new tweet with “@idealogmag” and you follow me (@henry__oliver – plug!), you will see that tweet even if you don’t follow @idealogmag. Will it stop the use of Twitter as a customer complaint platform? One can only hope.

But, replies are still invisible unless you follow both people, so if I reply to a tweet from @idealogmag it will only show in your fed if you follow us both.

You will be able to retweet yourself

Did you post an amazing tweet when you got home at 2:45AM and nobody saw it? Just retweet yourself at a high-traffic time. Easy!

Pictures/GIFs/polls/etc will not count toward the character limit

Phew. That was such a waste.

Handles won’t count if they start tweets

So tweeting “@idealogmag …” will give you more to work with than “Hey @idealogmag …”

Quoted tweets won’t count either, so if you want to tweet something really long, just write half of it and then quote that tweet and add the second half.

Got it? Got it!

Any questions, just tweet at @jack, I’m sure he’ll get back to you ASAP.

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