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I apologize if this is off topic, but from the other comments it seems that everyone here was aware of this .@ command (something I'd never heard of before). Is
by Permit 15y ago
I apologize if this is off topic, but from the other comments it seems that everyone here was aware of this .@ command (something I'd never heard of before). Is there some kind of list where all these special commands may be found?
- nollidge 15y agoIt's not really a command, just convention. If my tweet begins with @Permit, then it's only visible to the intersection of your and my followers, so somebody that follows me but not you would not see it. But if I start it with anything else (people have just adapted . as a convention, but it could be anything) then it's visible to ALL of my followers. Except, as this article explains, if I used the formal Reply button on one of your tweets. EDIT: s/union/intersection
- bmm6o 15y agoI don't use Twitter, but it sounds like you're describing the intersection, not the union. </pedantry>
- nollidge 15y agoCorrected, thanks.
- Permit 15y agoOh I see, that makes perfect sense actually. Thanks you.
- alanfalcon 15y agoI guess there's value in explicitly calling out to your followers that you're broadcasting your reply with the ".@" but I find it horrendously ugly, even in the Twitter world where tweets like @bob RT @Mary #FF @Ryan @Greg #ThePiManCometh t.co/Nf8QZ are commonplace and obviously ugly, I find them less so than .@ —My preferred way to broadcast a reply to all is either with a leading space (if that even works anymore) or to use as much English as possible (Well, @Bingo I think we have a #Nameo problem). But that could just be me being a terrible Twitter user (you'll see on my feed that I tend to prune my own tweets down to exactly 140 characters and try to avoid abbreviations, acronyms, etc., though I retweet many other tweets). I also rarely broadcast replies because I figure that nobody cares unless they already follow both of us in the conversation, and also because I have my website configured to display recent tweets that aren't @ replies, so I have better control over what's showing on my blog sidebar (without limiting my ability to @reply).
- mmahemoff 15y agoWell sometimes the leading . is useful to you're replying to something. An arguably better convention is simply to @ the person you're replying to at the end of the tweet. If it's a tweet worth broadcasting, it may as well read like an ordinary tweet.
- baddox 15y agoAgain, you mean the intersection of your and my followers.
- nollidge 15y agoAh crap. Fixed.
- Dylan16807 15y agoI'm confused. I'm looking around at a few accounts and I see a LOT of them starting with @whatever where I do not follow the other person. Is this a setting somewhere? Did I completely misunderstand? And they show up whether or not I am logged in, whether or not I am following the person using @whatever. Are you sure this tweet-hiding applies when not using the Reply button?
- abraham 15y agoIf you look directly at someones profile you will see all of their tweets regardless of who they are too. The reply behavior only applies to the tweets you see in your home timeline.
- Dylan16807 15y agoOh. Thank you.
- nollidge 15y agoYeah, what abraham said. Sorry, that could've been clearer.
- krausejj 15y agomost of twitter's userbase is also confused
- lazerwalker 15y agoTwitter's reply/reply-all logic is that if an @username is the first word of a tweet, it's considered to be a direct reply to only them (and thus is only shown to people following both of you). This makes sense, since a tweet that otherwise includes a username (say, "At the beach with @so-and-so!") is clearly not supposed to be a reply. Adding a single character before the username is just a lazy way to throw off the 'first word as username = direct reply' check; using a period instead of any other symbol is more convention than a specific 'special command'.