> we are removing them because we don’t believe the “Like” button provides sufficient, thoughtful consideration prior to amplifying Tweets to people who don’t follow the author of the Tweet, or the relevant topic that the Tweet is about
It's amusing that it took the election for them to finally admit this. I had thought much the same thing of Twitter's recommendations for a long time. People discussing divisive political issues shows up on my feed a lot, despite deliberate curation of who I follow, just because the people whose personal work I appreciate also happen to participate in political discussions in addition to posting their work, so the issues they "like" get posted on my feed. All of the posts they liked were from accounts I had no interest in following. Personally this change would cut down on the signal to noise ratio for me.
I am thinking they had to balance the improvement in their metrics for engagement they would gain by putting more novel out of network tweets in view, and the virtol and divisiveness the election-related media and misinformation propagating further would inevitably cause. Yes, there is not enough "sufficient, thoughtful consideration" put into the recommendations, but if they ultimately increase Twitter's user engagement and revenue then it takes a lot of effort to backtrack on them. It also makes me continue to believe that some kinds of information are detrimental in some ways, and Twitter is now controlling the flow of that information as to prevent public backlash or some other harm.
It's amusing that it took the election for them to finally admit this. I had thought much the same thing of Twitter's recommendations for a long time. People discussing divisive political issues shows up on my feed a lot, despite deliberate curation of who I follow, just because the people whose personal work I appreciate also happen to participate in political discussions in addition to posting their work, so the issues they "like" get posted on my feed. All of the posts they liked were from accounts I had no interest in following. Personally this change would cut down on the signal to noise ratio for me.
I am thinking they had to balance the improvement in their metrics for engagement they would gain by putting more novel out of network tweets in view, and the virtol and divisiveness the election-related media and misinformation propagating further would inevitably cause. Yes, there is not enough "sufficient, thoughtful consideration" put into the recommendations, but if they ultimately increase Twitter's user engagement and revenue then it takes a lot of effort to backtrack on them. It also makes me continue to believe that some kinds of information are detrimental in some ways, and Twitter is now controlling the flow of that information as to prevent public backlash or some other harm.