Twitter explains random favorite tweets in Timeline

Twitter's Dick Costolo has tweeted about the recent change in the Timeline behavior which placed other users' favorited tweets in the user's feed, after receiving some criticism.

Twitter's CEO has tweeted a response against the criticism from users regarding random favorites appearing in their Timeline.

During the last few weeks, Twitter has been placing favorited tweets from others in the user's timeline and active users have not been happy with the change which brings in unrelated tweets into their view.

One such user @YS (Youssef) tagged Twitter CEO, Dick Costolo, in one of his tweets and received the explanation regarding the matter.

@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

According to Costolo, when a user refreshes the timeline twice and there is no data retrieved from the server, instead of giving an empty response, Twitter shows favorited tweets or similar activity from other users.

@AstroKatie ...2x request for more content is a strong signal that person wants more content. So the goal is to respond to that well.
— dick costolo (@dickc) August 31, 2014

Further, he has explained that refreshing twice indicates a strong need for more content, and satisfying the goal can be achieved by pushing such data to the Timeline.

Source: Twitter via Engadget