Twitter says retweet functionality will go back to normal following an experiment that was introduced around the time of the U.S. presidential election.
First introduced in October, the social media giant thought that the change would encourage users to be more mindful of what they were sharing.
However, Twitter says this wasn’t the case. It notes that “the use of quote tweets increased, but 45 percent of them included single-word affirmations and 70 percent had less than 25 characters. The increase in quote tweets was also offset by an overall 20 percent decrease in sharing through both retweets and quote tweets.”
The change was confusing for many users who didn’t realize that they could still just do a regular retweet by leaving the quote tweet text box empty, which likely led to people using a single word in a quote tweet.
Although this experiment wasn’t exactly a success for the social media giant, it says that it’s going to “continue to focus on encouraging more thoughtful amplification.”
Source: Twitter
