It’s not exactly a silent spring, but a change made to Twitter’s settings this afternoon has already greatly reduced the tweets its users are witness to. In what the company called a small settings update, users no longer see public replies sent by friends to people they themselves are not following. (Fragmented conversations, they are called.) This isn’t a small change at all; it’s big, and it’s bad. The new setting eliminates serendipitous social discovery.
