Either way, it is true that the heart is more expressive than the star.
Advertisement
Samantha Gordon said: “Twitter, why conform to Facebook and make the favorite a like??”.
So first Twitter tried a TV ad, now they’re getting rid of the favorite star and replacing it with a heart.
The latest modification has been made to engage more users to the platform, which has seen a slower growth as compared to other social networking giants like Facebook and Instagram.
In essence, Twitter likes still work the same way as favourites did, your followers won’t see anything you’ve liked unless they go to your profile.
Product manager Akarshan Kumar says the shift helps invite new users into the fold and can be easily understood no matter the Twitter enthusiast’s background. Because they are fucking idiots with too much time on their hands. “And in our tests, we found that people loved it”, Kumar further wrote.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Twitter users have questioned the change, including a few current and former Twitter employees.
Using the heart isn’t exactly something new for Twitter given that it purchased the livestreaming app Periscope earlier this year which uses hearts to show when a user is liking a livestream. According to Gizmodo, Stylish lets you turn the heart icon into any emoji of your choice. It is now replaced with a heart that gives users the ability to “like” tweets.
The sudden change was felt all across the platform’s web service, iOS and Android apps, as well as Vine. The London Evening Standard notes that tweets about the change range from people telling Twitter to “be itself” to warnings that a “like” may not be as universally suitable as a “favourite”. Twitter will soon bring it to Vine for iOS and Twitter for Mac.
So will Twitter come around to the heart?
Advertisement
Not everyone is of course pleased with this new development from Twitter.
