Twitter experiment shows tweets favourited by others, people they follow

Twitter has been tweaking its features for a while now - revamping direct messaging, adding pop-up notifications on its web app and allowing users to upload animated gifs.

But in one of its more annoying tweaks, Twitter displays who you follow and posts you’ve favourited on your followers’ timelines. Obviously, Twitter users aren’t very impressed and see it as an unnecessary update.

Retweets are a way to republish posts that your followers might find interesting, though Favourites are more of bookmarks that you’ll want to revisit later. Favourites are rather private and might not necessarily appeal to your followers’ tastes. This explains why it’s annoying those who care enough to notice. Also, the post that shows what someone has favourited, gives you the option to retweet or favourite that post from your timeline, which is the same as retweeting. Note that the desktop version shows your favourite posts on your public profile.

What seems unnecessary to Twitter users, might mean a lot to Twitter itself. Twitter needs more and more people to engage on the site, which is possible only if users see and circulate more posts. If you look closely, Twitter has sneakily tried to broadcast more posts disguising it under ‘Follows’ and ‘Favorites’ in its latest experiment. Unsurprisingly, Twitter users are not very pleased.

Despite the criticism, it might be foolish to expect Twitter to revert the changes any time soon. Letting users see more of what you do on social media is a tried and tested method to promote engagement and there’s little that can go wrong. Facebook does it with its News Feed, and so does Google+. Even though, right now, Twitter is flooded with users voicing their displeasure, there’s a good chance that they would soon go back to using their Twitter accounts just as they used to, ignoring the change.