I woke up one morning last week with over one hundred notifications from a reply to a popular verified Twitter account, as my reply eventually had separate groups of people arguing with each other. I assume most of them had forgotten that I was even involved in the conversation, or gave a second thought to it. Nonetheless, a conversation that had moved far beyond anything to do sent me a notification on each tweet.

Here is the problem: Because of Twitter's new reply system, you do not need to include someone's username to reply to them. I am of the opinion that the old system was better. Yes, new one allows for more characters not taken up by usernames, but the old one limited the number of people you replied to in one thread.

Under the old system, I would have never gotten that many notifications for tweets that have nothing to do with me, because people would have removed @ConservaTibbs to save necessary characters in the 140 limit. I had to mute notifications for the first post in the mega-thread. I have never had to do that before. Even a day and a half later, I was still getting notifications when I temporarily un-muted the thread.

I hope Twitter considers going back to the old system, which also had the added benefit of forcing people to be a little more imaginative. Muting the thread is an option if you are getting too many notifications, of course, but the new system creates a bigger problem than it solved.