Twitter has updated its Tweets, making the online discussions more difficult to engage in, Andy Carvin reported for NPR's All Tech Considered blog.

The new Tweet design makes it impossible for users to interact in a conversation that involve members whose tweets they do not subscribe to. This change marks a shift from the original format, which allowed open access to online discourse between known and unknown users. Twitter's Biz Stone addressed the change in format on the company's blog, writing that the recent update "removes this undesirable and confusing option" of "receiving one-sided fragments via replies sent to folks you don't follow."

Dissenters, such as NPR's Carvin, maintain this "undesirable option" is "one of the most powerful aspects of Twitter" and that it is essential to the social networking aspect of the site.

Marshall Kirkpatrick echoed this sentiment on ReadWriteWeb, stating "This new Twitter policy breaks one of the fundamental rules of social activity streams: that I can discover new people by seeing who is conversing with people I already know."

In the latest statement from Twitter, responding to the outcry against the recent updates, the company said that they've "received lots of great info about the replies setting we changed yesterday" and have "started designing a new feature which will give folks far more control over what they see from the accounts they follow," NPR reported.