Twitter CEO @DickC Explains How Stray Favorites Show Up In Your Timeline

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo does customer service.

Costolo, aka @DickC, has taken to Twitter this week to explain more about how seemingly random tweets are appearing in user timelines.

Turns out, the more you refresh your mobile Twitter app, the more likely you are to see tweets that have been favorited. If you refresh your feed twice and the people you follow haven’t provided any new material, Twitter might insert a tweet favorited by a friend.

Here’s how Costolo put it in two Twitter replies:

@YS @mjbiren you get favorites when you pull-to-refresh 2x and we have no new tweets from follows both times.

— dick costolo (@dickc) August 31, 2014

@alloy @tonyarnold that’s correct. Signal you want more content when you ask for it 2x, so if we don’t have any, we show fav’s from follows

— dick costolo (@dickc) September 3, 2014

Costolo’s tweets appear to be the first official comment from the company about this new practice, that it tested and put into practice two weeks ago. It’s widely seen as an attempt to boost engagement on the network and give new users more reasons to stick around. However, many Twitter power users are irate at the introduction of anything foreign into their feeds.

Costolo’s explanation is unlikely to soothe those concerns. It also doesn’t explain how the process works on the desktop site (If you refresh the page twice without pulling in new tweets, does it display a favorite?).

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