Twitter’s turning favourites into retweets, for some reason

Twitter is experimenting with a new feature that effectively turns favourites into retweets for some users. Whereas Facebook wanted to mess with our minds, it seems that Twitter just wants to mess with our feeds. But it’s hard to tell which might be the most irritating.

Twitter’s long been a fan of experimentation and often that’s led to great things (hellooooo mute function). But sometimes it’s led to terrible, awful, no good ideas, like (briefly) letting blocked users see the tweets they were supposed to be blocked from looking at.

The company’s latest idea is to show everything you’ve faved to all of your followers, whether it’s a joke you liked almost enough to RT, or a “thank you” you wanted to acknowledge. The stuff you weren’t sharing with everyone else for a reason, in other words. And because fair’s fair, you’ll get your feed clogged up with other people’s favourites, too (hellooooo mute function).

This effectively turns favourites into retweets, which everyone knows have VERY different functions (you already know which we prefer) and anyway, isn’t that what the Discover tab is for? Whatever the mysterious reasoning behind this experiment (the official blog is telling us nothing), the internet is not happy, with most tweets about the new feature along the lines of ‘why god whyyyy’.

Seriously, Twitter, how about we all wake up tomorrow and just pretend this never happened?