Twitter's latest social experiment overwhelms users with needless spam

[Guest Chuong H Nguyen]

 

In its latest experiment, Twitter is receiving a lot of complaints from irked users when it decided to tweak its network to retweet messages that users mark as favorites. Users are complaining that they are seeing tweets that are favorited by those whom they follow in their Twitter timeline like a retweet, with many also getting notification alerts when others follow a new users.

 

 

The experiment began on a smaller scale several weeks ago and it appears that Twitter is widening this experiment to more users according to a report from The Next Web. Most notably, former Wall Street Journal and All Things D editor, now with Re/Code, Peter Kafka is lamenting on the network itself, "Twitter filling my feed with stuff I didn't ask for - stuff other people follow and fav."

 

Whereas retweeting is an explicit act of sharing on Twitter for content that users find interesting, marking a Tweet as a "favorite" is a far more passive act to acknowledge the sender of the original tweet, thank the person, or agree with them. By automatically retweeting content marked as favorite can overwhelm users of Twitter as it adds content that may not be shared in the first place.

 

So far, Twitter has not responded to comments about its latest social experiment, though the company has a blog to explain some of its trials.

 

Are you seeing this latest experiment in your Twitter feed? Let us know in the comments.

 

Source: The Next Web

 

 

 

 

 

Continue reading...