If you’re twitter, it can be tough to find ways to keep your platform fresh. Allowing embeded vines and videos is a start, but how much room is there for innovation when tweets are limited to 140 characters? In an attempt to switch things up, twitter began experimenting with numerous tweaks, and users aren’t happy – particularly about the way twitter is treating favorites as retweets.

Retweets and favorites are supposed to be two distinct things: A retweet is a way of sending someone else’s message to your own followers, while a favorite is a more private way of acknowledging or thanking someone else’s tweet. Twitter has confounded the two, however, by making it so that favorites from people you follow appear in your timeline much the way a retweet would. Only some users appear to be subjects of the experiment, but those that are aren’t happy about it. They’ve also started showing notifications announcing when people follow others, again effectively turning the action into a public endorsement. Those affected voiced their frustrations on twitter:

Ooh now twitter inserting selected “[person you follow] faved” tweets into main timeline pic.twitter.com/zDhrNseNGs

— Hunter Walk (@hunterwalk) August 16, 2014

I DO NOT WANNA SEE WHAT PEOPLE FAVORITE ON MY TIMELINE THANKS TWITTER

— beverly. (@breadverly) August 17, 2014

.@twitter so you’re showing what people favorite on my timeline now? Isn’t that what a RT is for?

— Nathan William (@Treadzone) August 17, 2014

 

Twitter has not commented on these particular experiments, and often directs media towards this blog post that speaks to experiments in broad strokes. It’s rare, they say, for a day to go by that doesn’t include the release of one experiment or another. Users rarely even notice the changes, but this time, it looks like twitter struck a chord.