Twitter is going to start displaying tweets in your feed of people you don’t follow, because it thinks you want them. Just to be clear, Twitter: I don’t, and neither do the majority of your users.
Twitter has been testing out the idea over the past couple of months — you may have noticed tweets in your timeline from people you don’t follow, and wondered what was going on — and now the idea is being rolled out to everyone’s feed.
In a blog post explaining the move, the Twitter product team leader, Trevor O’Brien, wrote:
One of our goals for experimentation is to continue improving your home timeline. After all, that’s the best way to keep up with everything happening in your world. Choosing who to follow is a great first step – in many cases, the best Tweets come from people you already know, or know of. But there are times when you might miss out on Tweets we think you’d enjoy. To help you keep up with what’s happening, we’ve been testing ways to include these Tweets in your timeline — ones we think you’ll find interesting or entertaining.
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For example, we recently ran experiments that showed different types of content in your timeline: recommended Tweets, accounts and topics. Testing indicated that most people enjoy seeing Tweets from accounts they may not follow, based on signals such as activity from accounts you do follow, the popularity of the Tweets, and how people in your network interact with them. These experiments now inform the timeline you see today.
On its help site, Twitter explains that it selects such tweets “using a variety of signals, including how popular it is and how many people in your network are interacting with it.”
That surely isn’t necessary: if a tweet is “popular” among people I follow, one of them will surely retweet it — that’s the beauty of Twitter, and it should trust its own model.
Facebook friends
This shift takes Twitter down the same road as Facebook: it shows trending news stories that it thinks you may be interested in, content that’s related to what your friends post, and — unless you turn it off — fiddles with your newsfeed to show the updates from your friends it thinks you’ll be most interested in, rather than simply the most recent posts.
This is deeply irritating. Considering all the information Facebook has about me, it doesn’t actually know me very well, and Twitter knows me even less well.
I follow some people because I know them, some for work, some because I enjoy their personality, others because I like their links, and some because they have completely contrary opinions to me, and I enjoy testing my beliefs. (I’m a barrel of laughs, I know.) My feed is a carefully curated, and constantly edited, pile of stuff I like and sometimes dislike. And I don’t want anyone messing with it.
Nor do other Twitter users, based on the response to the tweet of the blog post:
Twitter could address this all very easily by making it an option. If someone wants suggested tweets, let them have it. And for the rest of us who don’t, let us turn it off.
Depending on the data
Twitter’s response will of course be predictable: you may say you don’t want this, but our tests show that you clicked the links, and we have the data to prove it.
The problem is clicks don’t indicate approval, and there was no way to show disapproval. Sometimes tech companies put too much trust in their user data, and their interpretation of it, rather than simply asking people what they want.
Microsoft used a similar argument to Twitter’s to get rid of the Start menu, saying its telemetry showed few people actually used it. And we all know how that turned out.
