14 DAY TRIAL // For a short period of time, if you were added to a list on Twitter, you did not get a notification about it. This isn’t some kind of bug, but an update the company rolled out without really thinking it through.
The community stepped up, however, and told Twitter the truth as it was - that it was a bad idea and people could be targeted without even knowing about it. An alternative, as many suggested, was to actually allow people to remove themselves from lists, which would have been much more helpful.
“We want you to get notifications that matter. Starting today, you won’t get notified when you are added to a list,” reads the official announcement.
Following the massive pushback from users, Twitter decided to roll back the update. And it only took two hours to do it, which is impressive considering that other tech companies wouldn’t go to such troubles if users didn’t like one of the features they implemented.
“We heard your feedback - this was a misstep. We’re rolling back the change and we’ll keep listening,” the company wrote following the flood of messages they received.
Quick backtrack
While the idea that the notifications panel should be a bit cleaner isn’t a bad one, cutting out lists from the area won’t help anyone. It truly looks like Twitter simply didn’t realize that people could be targeted and added to lists without their knowledge and everything else that comes with such a move.
Once again, the speed with which Twitter handled the situation was more than commendable and should be taken into consideration by all tech companies when dealing with feedback from customers. While it’s true that people may not be paying cash to use these services, they are “paying” with their private data, which is just as valuable for tech giants, which makes users’ voices very important.
On the other hand, if Twitter could go ahead and build a way to help people remove themselves from other users’ lists, that would be great.