>Second, we will prevent “liked by” and “followed by” recommendations from people you don’t follow from showing up in your timeline and won’t send notifications for these Tweets. These recommendations can be a helpful way for people to see relevant conversations from outside of their network, but 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.
I want to applaud this, because it's clearly a good move. but i don't see how they can square "our recommendation engine is harmful enough that we need to disable it to protect the security of an election" with "we're gonna turn it back on in four weeks"
> 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.
>>Second, we will prevent “liked by” and “followed by” recommendations from people you don’t follow from showing up in your timeline and won’t send notifications for these Tweets.
I don't know if a Twitter PM will read this, but showing Likes in my feed — and not having an option to turn it off in the official mobile app client — is one big reason I stopped consuming tweets.
It's a shame that the only way to opt out of seeing Likes is by using a third-party client.
> Don't forget the part where they now show you tweets that people you follow have liked, just the same as if they had retweeted them.
I rarely use twitter but the first time I saw these "person X liked this" I just looked up how to not get that. Turns out it's pretty simple, you just click on that tweet menu and select "I don't like this tweet", repeat for maybe one or two other tweets on your timeline, and then refresh your feed and they're all gone. People mentioned it can come back after a couple months, you'd notice quickly as your feed quality would suck, you just redo the same.
The only one I see now are "person X and Y liked Z tweet" but in that case I follow X, Y, and Z, so it's usually relevant.
> but get fed with all of their garbage "liked" content and can't filter that out.
I definitely filter those out.
About once every 6 months the tweets "liked" by people I follow pop up again, it's usually very noticable as the feeds quality turns down dramatically.
To get rid of those, I do the "..." > "I don't like this tweet" > "show fewer likes from XYZ" on 2 or 3 tweets, and they're all gone for another few months.
It's not ideal, a settings menu where you can disable those permanently would be far better, but it works.
>First, we will encourage people to add their own commentary prior to amplifying content by prompting them to Quote Tweet instead of Retweet.
>Second, we will prevent “liked by” and “followed by” recommendations from people you don’t follow from showing up in your timeline and won’t send notifications for these Tweets.
These are great, I wish we could have these policies all the time, not just election season. This would probably harm engagement metrics (since retweeting without commentary is low-effort) but increase the quality of the feed by reducing noise and increasing context of tweets.
>this also appears like a convenient way to obscure the fact that certain tweets with a large number of likes are being artificially juiced by bot accounts
I'm not sure. You will (AFAIU) still able to check who liked a particular tweet, so you can check suspicious tweets for bot activity. But you won't be able to pivot and check which tweets were liked by a (suspected) bot account.
It's bad day for transparency, but this is not completely unlike other platforms (for example: I can't check the list of google docs you have access to, but I can check a list of people who have access to the google doc I have opened)
> but you can't turn off seeing what people you follow like
Yes you can, not through an official setting unfortunately. But as TylerH said you just say "I don't like this tweet" on a few of the tweets that you see because "person X liked this", then refrsh your feed and they're all gone.
Maybe after 6 months-ish they come back, but you notice it really fast since suddenly your twitter feed sucks. Just do the "I don't like this tweet" trick again.
The only 'likes' I see now is if multiple people I follow liked a tweet from someone I also follow. Usually those are good quality.
> Twitter however now also displays tweets people I follow have liked and that has been the worst change for me.
I rarely go on Twitter but I've noticed that the "X liked this" are usually the worst of all on my newsfeed.
But there's a fix for this: click on the "..." menu -> "I don't like this tweet" on a few of them, and then you shouldn't see any more of the "X liked this tweet"
The only one I see now are "X and Y liked this tweet from Z" but in that case I follow both X, Y, and Z.
This has improved the quality of the feed dramatically.
Twitter stopped showing "liked" tweets from people you don't follow on the timeline. It's been an enormously positive change, in my opinion. It also happens to be a change that their users have been requesting for years. But, they have ignored those requests until they felt that this feature might actually hasten the destruction of American democracy. Dragging people into fights with people they've never met is quite good for engagement, as has been endlessly noted. I have no doubt they'll reinstate this feature after the election.
Speaking personally, there are several people I follow who never actually generated real content. Instead they just liked asinine, toxic political takes, which then filled my feed.
unfortunately, twitter seems determined to ruin this for users, with features like "* liked this" and "You might like" showing up in users' timelines with no ways to turn them off.
> * Let me choose the types of tweets I see. Personally I want to see zero of (@person liked, @person replied to, ...)
or even better make that a whitelist or blacklist option. There are some people who retweet way too much but others I'm perfectly happy to see them from.
Do you happen to not receive Twitter's "recommendations"? I follow your steps religiously and I still get constantly bombarded by terrible "we think you'll like this" notifications that cannot be turned off.
>I realized even they will pollute my feed with politically divisive topics, whether it be from them retweeting something, or liking a tweet, or even entering into the fray themselves
Sorting by "Latest" rather than "Home" makes it so you don't see their likes and replies. I would recommend it to anyone.
> Assuming too much retweeting will clog my followers’ feeds.
You can choose to mute retweets from an account without muting the whole account, so that's not too much of a problem. If you retweet too much they can mute your retweets.
Recently something changed though, and now things you Like can also show up in your friend's feeds, and I haven't found any way on the default twitter site to mute those. So Likes can actually be more spammy than retweets now!
I want to applaud this, because it's clearly a good move. but i don't see how they can square "our recommendation engine is harmful enough that we need to disable it to protect the security of an election" with "we're gonna turn it back on in four weeks"
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