If you thought the fact that Twitter favorites are public knowledge was bad enough, you're going to be really unhappy about the site's latest social networking experiment.
In what seems to be an attempt at increasing interactions, Twitter has started publishing favorited tweets on timelines as if they have been retweeted, inciting a backlash from users, Mashable reported.
Users responded to the Twitter test with "hundreds" of negative tweets with no one seeming to support the potential feature, according to The Guardian.
Similar to the Facebook "like," a Twitter favorite is a way to show quiet appreciation for a tweet, while sharing a tweet through the retweet function demonstrates active support for the message of 140 characters or less.
Twitter said in a company blog post last year that the site was experimenting more than ever with new features.
"In recent months, that trend has picked up--so much so that it's rare for a day to go by when we're not releasing at least one experiment," Alex Roetter, vice president of engineering, wrote in the post dated Sept. 12, 2013.
Users who hate the update may be reassured by the fact that many Twitter ideas don't stick around.
"Those experiments are perhaps even more valuable because they help us decide what not to do--which is important as we work to keep Twitter simple while improving the user experience," Roetter wrote. "Ultimately, our goal is to learn and keep making the product better; we aren't necessarily looking to launch all of the experiments we roll out."
One experiment that seems to have recently made the cut is the embed option, which lets users put links to tweets within a tweet as an alternative to quote retweeting and adding a comment.
Twitter has revealed that the site has around 23 million "bot" accounts that post automatic updates without the aid of a human. The microblogging sphere has around 271 million monthly active user accounts altogether.
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