Stuff:
Perhaps I’m now just an old social media git yelling at a heart-shaped cloud. Maybe Twitter isn’t misunderstanding the user experience at all, and it’s just a few long-term users who are grumbling. For all I know, Twitter newcomers worldwide are now sighing with relief because that difficult favorites button (three whole syllables!) has gone, replaced by clickable hearts. But a quick glance at replies to Twitter’s own tweets about the change suggests otherwise, and it really does feel like a mis-step that reduces the flexibility of a previously versatile feature.
As a maniacal Twitter user, I completely agree. While “Faves” may not have been great, “Hearts” seems infinitely worse. What if I wanted to bookmark someone’s outrageous or offensive tweet to refer to it later? Twitter seems to think it’s OK for me to use the universal symbol of love to do that. Worse, Twitter’s reasoning, as laid out in this piece, is either mindless marketing speak or quite literally idiotic.
I just share the tweet to instapaper and I can reference it later that way. Fave already seemed like an endorsement now twitter just made it more explicit.
Twitter wants more interactions. That is a metric they think will drive usage and ultimately revenue. Most users are not bloggers who want to save and refer back to Tweets later on. They simply want to just consume.
People are really overthinking this whole thing.
“What if I wanted to bookmark someone’s outrageous or offensive tweet to refer to it later?”—Twitter doesn’t want to cater to you, probably. The “like/fav content you dislike” seems to be a user behavior they don’t want to endorse. They probably aren’t going to say as much to heavy Twitter users.
I’m really not much of a Twitter user, but I don’t really get how “favoriting” something offense is semantically so much better than clicking a heart. They both imply that you like the thing in question, no?
Yeah, I’m with you. I don’t get the kerfuffle. I’ve heard others spout the same nonsense as Shawn. However, I completely agree that using a heart shaped “like” to bookmark something offensive isn’t really any worse or better than calling the same content a “favorite.”
You’re free to continue using the tool in the same manner while ignoring the shape of the button you’re clicking.
I don’t understand “caring about Twitter”, so I’m double-disconnected from caring about the exact modal difference between “favorite” and “heart”…
I don’t see a big semantic change there, really; presumably if onlookers didn’t interpret Mr. King “favoriting” something offensive as endorsement, they wouldn’t have any reason to think “hearting” it was really any different.
And, well, caring about what some third party might think about your Twitter traffic at that level seems weird.