Back in October, Twitter introduced a new experience for retweeting, which prompted the tweet composer immediately instead of giving the option to choose between a standard retweet or a quote tweet. The measure was introduced as part of a series of steps to help protect the U.S. election in November, but the experiment carried on for a few more weeks.
Now, Twitter is giving up on this approach, saying that it didn"t fulfill its goals in the way it had hoped. While it aimed to encourage users to be more thoughtful when sharing and promoting other tweets, that didn"t really happen because, while quote tweets were used more often, they didn"t add much to the conversation. 45% of quote tweets only had one word, and 70% of them had less than 25 characters.
On top of that, and probably more relevant to Twitter, overall sharing (via traditional retweets or quote tweets) dropped by 20% during this time. Like most social networks, Twitter probably wants its users to be active on the platform, so it"s not surprising that the company would want to bring those statistics back up.
Twitter says it will continue to encourage its users to be more careful when sharing information on the platform, though. Users will continue to be prompted to read an article before sharing, something the company first tested back in June. Unlike the quote tweet prompts, Twitter has said that this measure actually helped users think before sharing.