chsilverman

I see the reasoning, some of it. In my case, though, I don’t want to emphasize the WordPress-ness of syndicated tweets, for the reasons I mentioned earlier. For what I’m building, I really do need the Twitter posts to be “just a thread”, and the promotional aspect feels kind of grubby, to the point that I’d be uncomfortable having Jetpack publish to my Twitter feed in the way that it does.

This is why I think opinionated design decisions always, always need to be tempered by user control. Automattic’s product/marketing teams just can’t anticipate every use case. I don’t doubt that your data supports the assumption that many users will want to be more aggressive about marketing their blogs, and will find the auto-tweets useful. But in this instance, I’m building a microblog that’s a mirror of my Twitter account, not a destination for my Twitter followers. There’s no reason to drive people to the blog; the posts don’t provide anything that’s not on Twitter, and I’d much prefer interactions occurred on Twitter, as you pointed out yourself, and not the blog.

I’ve been using WordPress since 1.0, primarily because it’s been very good about giving me near-absolute control over my site; my digital home, as you said. When a product design group at Automattic removes that control, and enforces its own preferences about how to best represent me online, it feels less like my home and more like someone else’s home.

I very much appreciate you filing an issue about this; I’d think giving users more control over their content would be a reasonable idea.

Thanks again for your time here.

Worked perfectly! Thank you.