Twitter Makes 'Bookmarks' A Public Statistic, Letting Posters Know How Many People Have Saved Their Photos To A Private Collection For Unknown Reasons

For its entire history, Twitter has had a "like" system that not only allows users to show appreciation for a tweet but also gives them the chance to easily find it again once they scroll through their publically available "liked tweets" tab. However, this created a small problem where a user might want to find a tweet they saw but didn't like and not have an easy method of rediscovering it.

Twitter addressed this issue by adding the "Bookmark" feature, which allows users to put a tweet in a private library of their bookmarked tweets but not let their followers or the original poster know it's there. Yesterday, they made the number of times a tweet has been bookmarked public information.

As with basically every new design tweak Twitter rolls out, this announcement was met with pushback from several users, who complained about the clutter of statistics that now sit at the bottom of every tweet.

Other users, however, identified a different problem. Imagine: What might be the sort of tweet a Twitter user would want to bookmark for a later date while making sure no one else knew they had bookmarked it?

It seems the major crisis brought about by Twitter making the number of a tweet's bookmarks public is that now users can see how their selfies are being added to anonymous users' tweet collections.

Considering the motivations one might have when privately saving a tweet, these "bookmarked" collections could potentially be "spank banks." This is not information everyone on Twitter wants to know — judging merely from the influx of tweets about it recently.

While there are some rumors that the tweets users have bookmarked are now public information, this is not the case (and a good thing too, or else things could get really messy).

Nevertheless, anyone who posts a selfie to Twitter now has to live with knowing that a certain number of people have saved their picture to a private collection of tweets for unknown purposes, which, suffice it to say, is pretty weird.