Besides, retweets, not likes, are Twitter’s most powerful method of reward.

The quest to accrue retweets regularly drives users to tweet outlandish comments, extremist opinions, fake news, or worse. Many users knowingly tweet false and damaging information and opinions in an effort to go viral via retweets. Entire Twitter accounts have been built on this strategy. If Twitter really wants to control the out-of-control rewards mechanisms it has created, the retweet button should be the first to go.

Retweets prey on users’ worst instincts. They delude Twitter users into thinking that they’re contributing to thoughtful discourse by endlessly amplifying other people’s points—the digital equivalent of shouting “Yeah, what they said!” in the midst of an argument. And because Twitter doesn’t allow for editing tweets, information that goes viral via retweets is also more likely to be false or exaggerated. According to MIT research published in the journal Science, Twitter users retweet fake news almost twice as much as real news. Some Twitter users, desperate for validation, endlessly retweet their own tweets, spamming followers with duplicate information.

Retweets were introduced, ironically, to make Twitter better. At the time, the company’s co-founder Biz Stone declared that “we hope interesting, newsworthy, or even just plain funny information will spread quickly through the network making its way efficiently to the people who want or need to know.” Retweets were an early way for the company to ensure that the most interesting and engaging content would bubble up in the feed and keep users entertained.

But for more than two and a half years, the company has shown people tweets based on an algorithmic accounting of exactly what the most interesting and engaging content is (yes, part of that algorithm takes user behavior like retweets into account). It has also tested suggesting tweets, recommending accounts to follow based on interest, and built Moments to surface noteworthy tweets about news events. The retweet isn’t just dangerous; it’s redundant.

It’s no surprise that users are also thirsting for a retweet-free version of Twitter. A browser extension that mutes retweets has been popular since 2013. In April, my colleague Alexis Madrigal wrote about how he used a script to eliminate retweets from his timeline and how it transformed his experience for the better. “Retweets make up more than a quarter of all tweets. When they disappeared, my feed had less punch-the-button outrage,” he wrote. “Fewer mean screenshots of somebody saying precisely the wrong thing. Less repetition of big, big news. Fewer memes I’d already seen a hundred times. Less breathlessness. And more of what the people I follow were actually thinking about, reading, and doing. It’s still not perfect, but it’s much better.”