Twitter lost the plot. Oh look, riots in Istabul. Four people injured. I guess I'd better heart that one. Because I love violence... What is the storyline here? Many people use Twitter for live coverage of events, to organize protests, and to keep up with professional news. How does a heart fit into these use cases??
Cynically I'd say that Twitter doesn't care about that use case because it's not one of the ones that make them money. The use case they care about is Advertisers looking at their engagement graphs and seeing that people liked their new product release tweet.
You're being too cynical. What brand wouldn't love to be seen enabling the downfall of a nefarious authoritarian regime? It is an advertisement more powerful than anything drafted on Madison Avenue.
It's a similar problem with 'Like' -- how do you 'like' a post about someone grieving a loss? FB is adding a different reaction button soon.
I think switching from Favorite is a good thing, as favoriting feels just personal, whereas a 'like' or a 'heart' is a public vote of support/appreciation. I do agree, though, that 'heart' is odd, but I can't think of anything else better.
They radically (and retrospectively) changed the semantics of one of their main actions. All favs, regardless of their original reason, now are "likes" and hearts. What was a reasonably neutral way to highlight tweets, one which could be used in different ways, now becomes one extremely charged with social meaning.
You're right... but even "favorites" means something similar to a lot of people (instead of what it means to most of us who've been long-time users of the internet -- "bookmarks").
I agree that this is going to be an issue going forward.
Yes, but at least "favorites" were somewhat more neutral. They still prevented me from "favoriting" negative news, as it felt like an endorsement.
Hearts work well for things like family photos and cats--the traditional strengths of Facebook. But Twitter's point of differentiation was always live, rapidly developing news. Conferences. Sharp commentary. Leaks. Announcements. A heart is just not the right symbol in these contexts.
Going for the broader market risks weakening the core use cases, which set the platform apart in the first place.
Throw likes and favorites out; use "remember". That's the only reason I like or now, favorite, something on Twitter; it has some significance to me (either positive or negative) that I may want to revisit.
I think twitter will have to eventually add something else that caters to the "bookmark" concept without positive or negative feelings clouding the act.
And it's not just a plain heart. Clicking on it initiates an animation that looks like the heart exploding, but in a celebratory way... like fireworks at a celebration.
Perhaps Twitter has no interest in having users "bookmark" live events, and would prefer to force or at least strongly encourage people to retweet instead.
So implicitly saying "Riots in Istanbul are my favorite!" is better? This is just same problem with liking. (e.g. "My dog died." "Like!") Will changing the terminology and the icon boost engagement? I don't know. I've seen stupider stuff work before.
Twitter has some dual personality when it comes to UX.
Recently, Twitter quietly started relying on the HTTP Referrer field. That's OK, I guess, except they did nothing to inform their users about it, which is easy for them to check and report on specifically. Instead, they let their users get confused by generic messages when attempting to post, or change settings, trying all sorts of things. If you want to require HTTP referrer, you should know what that means, and why many may have it disabled.
It's also interesting to see the social media sites and the web converging on using the same types of icons. All because of the mobile platform and a certain apple OS, with the cog wheel and menu symbol.
Heart versus star: I think the heart miscommunicates the function. I can't identify with it anymore, as I don't tend to "heart things".
Also, they didn't just change the icon, they changed the color as well. The star was a weak yellow. The heart is a darker, burning red, and therefore sticks out more in contrast with the white.
> Recently, Twitter quietly started relying on the HTTP Referrer field.
Yes! It took me weeks to figure that one out. In three years without Referer that was only my second non-obvious error caused by that.
And then they started with the polls. You can create polls from twitter web, but you cannot answer one. You just see a tweet from somebody asking a question. Nothing else, no way to even see that it is a poll. Same in tweetdeck (which is also by twitter). Confusing strategy, at least for me.
Another could be: "Our users are being innovate and using our services in ways we didn't completely anticipate, therefore we are trying to let our products grow "organically" and will make changes that augment what our users appear to be doing."
I would be more sympathetic to that explanation if the feature being rolled out was somehow novel or at least adding new functionality. But it's not, it's just removing a small quirk and making the service more like everything else on the internet.
It is exactly that. For example, imagine if Facebook made a public page listing all the times that you have ever clicked "like" on something. Weird, right? Twitter just made that.
I think this is a rather significant change.
Whereas before a favorite was the equivalent of a bookmark now it is more in line with the Facebook like or Instagram 'heart'.
This is a clear push for more engagement.
I personally like it. But I would still like to keep an option for bookmarking/read later (i.e. how I use the favorite button now).
Objectively, it is a little weird for Twitter to have its own bookmarking function, with a nice convenient list that you (or anyone) can refer to.
But that's exactly how I use "favorite". It's really useful, whether it's a cute picture I want to share with someone later or something more informative. "Like" does nothing for me; I don't always want to imply approval by clicking that button.
I use it the same way. But there have also been many times that I want to ACKNOWLEDGE that I enjoyed/liked/laughed at a tweet without polluting my favorites. A like button does just that.
However I don't like that they just switched the favorites over to likes. They should have added a new option and maybe hidden the favorite option a bit more (if it's that important to them).
The English word "favorite" implies approval every bit as much as "like" does. Plenty of people use "like" the way you use "favorite", indicating attention, not that your friend's cat's death is your "favorite" news of the day or that you "like" the news.
Sure, when speaking about the formal English language. In terms of social platforms, however, favorite and like have very different connotations. Favorite implies something far less common than a like. Most people think of a favorite as something they'd like to come back to, while no one really pays attention to every thing they've liked on FB or Instagram
Yes! Favorite has meaning beyond the literal for anyone who has been online for a few days. I fav to bookmark or give a simple thumbs up. Hearts break that meaning.
Perhaps, but the use of the "star" aligned with common usage on other sites to highlight something. And people often talked about "starring" tweets rather than "favoriting" tweets. If anything, it would have made more sense to change it from "favorite" to "star".
> The English word "favorite" implies approval every bit as much as "like" does
Personally I don't buy this. I'm used to 'favourites' and 'bookmarks' being used interchangably by browsers, which reduces the approval implication of that term... and the heart symbol doesn't mean 'like' to me, it means 'love', so has a higher level of implied approval than in your comparison.
Evernote (or similar) serves this function well, even better than a "favorite" because I can save/clip things from other sources. i.e. when I have time to read all the things I thought looked interesting I only need to to go Evernote, not to multiple sites.
A long press on Twitter's native [Android] app and selecting "Share via..." will allow you to easily/quickly save it to Evernote (or whatever similar service you may use).
It's interesting to me because Facebook just made the news recently for saying they'd try to come up with something akin to dislike because the "like" is too positive a sentiment for many situations (death of a relative, bad day at work, whatever). In the wake of that, Twitter didn't say "well the favorite is already neutral of emotions, and is more akin to showing support for the thing, positive or negative". Instead, they said "oooh, we want the problem Facebook is facing".
A lot of people use it as a way to get your attention without retweeting the post to their feed. I've started getting an increase in what seems to be automated favoriting (now liking), which is so incredibly annoying that I have to end up muting those users.
There are a few services that work with Twitter to do this - Pocket comes to mind. I know their Chrome extension will place "Pocket" buttons on each tweet allowing you to save them for later. Similarly, a long button press on iOS will allow you to send a link from within Twitter to Pocket.
I disagree. It is wholly insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Twitter can't be fixed by putting so much thought into an icon - the core engagement of it is slightly broken. Chris Sacca had a great article on what is wrong with Twitter [1]. TLDR: changing stars to hearts won't move then needle.
The fact that they devoted an entire blog post to it makes me feel like they're headed in the wrong direction.
I just woke up, and seeing the new page threw me off. It does completely change the sentiment, and evoke a completely different set of idea to see tiny hearts rather than generic impersonal 'fav'icons.
That's already been the way people have been using the favstar on twitter. The difference now is that it'll be obvious to more people that this is the main purpose of the feature. That plus now it'll be slightly different if you want to "favorite" something that is negative (the "like" problem).
Right, but since the context hasn't changed, they haven't increased the range of things you can convey in a given context, they've just changed what it conveys.
Honestly, it was for me when I started with twitter for real in 2010 (my account is from 2006, but I haven't really used it until 2010). It was unclear to me whether I should be using this as a kind of bookmark-feature as a help for me to remember tweets to get back to or whether this was a social signal I'd be sending to the author of the tweet.
The would make that much more clear to me, though of course, I have since learned how to use twitter properly (I hope).
Both Chrome and Firefox use a star icon as a shortcut to bookmark a page. I find it more surprising that you don't think people still bookmark websites. What do you use to remember links to pages you might want to visit again in the future?
You can often type some text that you remember from the URL or title in the URL bar and browsers will search the history and present you a set of pages you visited including the one you want.
Effectively it's like bookmarking everything and then using the keyboard to navigate among the bookmarks.
Normal bookmarks are still necessary if you need to record a set of multiple pages that meet some criteria.
>You can often type some text that you remember from the URL or title in the URL bar and browsers will search the history and present you a set of pages you visited including the one you want.
This fails to work for those of us who regularly clear browser history (e.g on shutdown), or bookmark articles from blog sites, or maybe the random URL of a site we've never visited that we're saving for later.
I used to, but the increasing amount of 404ing in my bookmark collection led me to stop trusting that I could get back to something with it. I think I'd prefer a "whole page snapshot" rather than a bookmark.
To prevent 404'ing an Archive service can be used. But I feel that is a little abusive to archive the page then bookmark the archive, so I take whole page screenshots. :)
I only bookmark a page when I want to add extra tags to find it by that don't appear in its URL or title. Otherwise, Firefox's "awesomebar" does an excellent job of finding what I want out of my history.
I have over 5K bookmarks, I mean I might be an exception but if a site has some interesting content/ideas I will bookmark it to its appropriate category folder.
Oh yes! I needed to perform some quick maintenance on my phone just after my first use of twitter but I'd forgotten to close the app and it took 10 minutes to work out why I couldn't get my Torx screwdriver to undo all the little screws in the screen!
Thankfully after today's change to hearts I feel much more comfortable to provide Twitter with more accurate interest metrics so that they might monetise my preferences more intelligently and thereby serve me ads more targeted to my needs.
EDIT: Oh fine, here's the /s
EDIT 2: Jeez, we don't do light hearted rambunctious rib-tickling round here then? Not even for such silly and transparent changes by a company desperately flapping around to improve it's monetisation? We do all see this is because of ads, right? This isn't for the users benefit, the thing works exactly the same way, Twitter just wants us to actually use it so they can get better data. That's worth a little jibe.
I assume they have data to back that claim up. And I can understand it. Putting all the knowledge and assumptions you have as person who (presumably) uses Twitter and is generally tech-savvy: what would a person assume a "star" button does?
It was confusing to me. "Wait... I'm favoriting it? What does that mean? I mean I like it but, why favorite the tweet? Will I want to come back to this tweet later? What's the point? Should I just retweet it? I don't like it that much that I want to RT it, and I don't want to spam my followers."
Maybe I over think things but, it was a bit confusing to me.
People associate the star icon with "bookmark" or "save for later" ala Chrome/Firefox/etc.
Then when they discover that it means "favorite" they basically don't use it because "favorite" is a singular thing, or at least an extremely strong emotion.
I am sort of tired of the ole lets make it emotional to make it stick [1] tactic.
Of course this is just my opinion but I sort of liked how Twitter was more newsy and less friendsy. I would even prefer the star to be a bookmark but I suppose it doesn't scale down well (size wise).
A heart conveys much more emotion than "like" or "favorite" – it's just an emoji, but still, it seems significant enough to me that I'll do less liking on Twitter.
Like also carries a connotation over from Facebook – liking a page on Facebook attaches it to my profile, and potentially feeds me content based on that, will this happen on Twitter? I can't assume it won't.
> liking a page on Facebook attaches it to my profile, and potentially feeds me content based on that, will this happen on Twitter? I can't assume it won't.
Your favorites/likes have always been visible to other users. e.g. here are the likes of the Twitter account in your HN profile https://twitter.com/radiofreejohn/favorites (interesting they've changed the text in the profiles to likes but the URL is still favorites).
[Perhaps I'm misunderstanding "will this happen on Twitter" and you're referring to someday filtering feeds...if that were to ever happen I imagine they would use this data regardless of what they call it]
Being visible and being a persistent measure of preference is different. Twitter is very ephemeral and my worry is that this will imply less ephemerality. It's an irrational worry.
I'm glad they're focusing on fixing major problems such as newcomers finding the functionality of the favorite button confusing, instead of trying to find new ways to deal with abuse on Twitter.
Companies like Twitter, Facebook have rolled out (Like/Hearts/emotions) button to posts. I think "heart" button is not appropriate categorization for real time contents. Sometimes we just want to express on things if they are relevant. The emotion part "Like, heart, dislike, chill, etc" is just an aftermath to the real intent.
Problem: "heart" can not express emotion that community wants to just share, it may not necessarily be likable. Example, Tweet about violence in Middle east. I want to just not give it a "heart" but some other emotion like "disgrace, shame" etc.
Idea: To solve this problem, I would say the real symbol should be "Star", instead of "heart, like" etc.
"Star" means you want to buzz in with this article but not classify your emotion.
What do you think?
TLDR + Sarcasm: "Today we made twitter a little bit more like facebook, because lets face it, some people are confused by stars and the word favorite."
> If you think the people you follow retweet bad stuff, you need to follow better people.
That's not a very good generalization - I have retweets turned off for many accounts I follow, some because I found I was interested in what they tweeted (so I wouldn't want to unfollow them) but less interested in what they retweet, but in most cases it's because I try to keep my feed relatively low-volume and some people are extremely liberal with their retweets so turning off retweets for those accounts keeps my feed more manageable.
I tried following good people on Twitter. Even some of the popular users on here, or other highly intelligent and respected people. I cannot think of anyone better to follow.
I can't do it. There's so, so much shit. It's a constant storm of random "news" plus attempts at being clever. Retweets amplify this significantly.
And then Twitter's web UI make the entire thing unusable. Click an image? Lose your place in a stream. It's an embarrassingly bad UI that seems designed to toss me to locations that are anything but where I was reading.
What I'm curious about, though, is a far more general question that this brings to mind. How do you build a social network that sustains itself through community rather than advertising dollars? Is that even possible?
Reddit seems to spend more than it brings in in a year, if reports that it had $20 million in cash when Conde Nast spun them off and had $18 million in 2013 are true.(1) Reddit also has ads. It doesn't seem like Reddit gold is sufficient to keep a large site afloat.
Starring a tweet always seemed a bit odd to me, except when using it to bookmark something for later. Hearts imply likes, based on other social platforms, which will almost certainly lead to more use. I found myself rarely, if ever, starring tweets, which actually made the function more useful (looking at my favorites is a short list of tweets I wanted to remember).
While we're on the subject, can somebody explain the behavioral difference between a star (or heart, whatever) and a retweet? They seem to have nearly the exact same effect
Using Facebook for comparison, a retweet is similar to the 'share' button. Heart parallels the 'like' button. Retweeting explicitly draws your followers' attention to the tweet. While a heart seems to have a multitude of purposes: right from expressing sentiment to bookmarking. Twitter in this case wishes to make it clear to new users that Heart is how they express sentiment. Behaviorally, retweets tend to be expression of public endorsement. While hearts(previously favorites) are a semi-private invocation of approval or interest
A retweet means the tweet being retweeted will show up on the feed of people who are following you. Star/Favoriting is just like a personal bookmark. It won't automatically show up on followers feeds.
They do also show your favourites in your followers feeds at times. I see it quite frequently. Retweets always show up to your followers. Favourites sometimes do. I don't know how they decide to show them in the main feed.
A retweet puts the tweet into your public feed, as if you had tweeted it (of course, in the UI it is correctly attributed to the original author). A favorite/star/heart/like/"the other button", just flags the tweet in your account so that you can refer to it easier later (in another, less public feed).
I thought they had added hearts along with stars that would have made sense! Stars for bookmarking and hearts for liking/showing appreciation. Stars doesn't send a notification to the poster but a heart does.
no every time someone fav/hearts a tweet the creator of that tweet gets a message saying someone loves there tweet, if it was just a bookmark then they wouldn't get this
This is hilarious. I mean in the absence of actual substantive things to do they are just doing fluffy things. How does this make their developer relations better in any way? Wasn't that something that was supposed to be coming? In the meantime we get a heart instead of a star? I mean what the hell? Are they taking the playbook from yahoo? Maybe they should make their logo more "showy" while they're at it.
In the past, Twitter didn't send notifications to anyone about what you favorited. They do now, which is weird when trying to use it as a bookmarking tool.
So now it's like Tumblr. Now they only need to remove 140-character limit and there will be no differences at all.
"The heart, in contrast, is a universal symbol that resonates across languages, cultures, and time zones."
I don't really buy it. Many countries have stars in their flags/coats of arms. There's no such unified symbolism for hearts. For example Chinese pictogram for heart is 心.
If there's anything anthropology has taught us, it's that the claim "X is a universal symbol that resonates across languages, cultures, and time zones" is almost certainly not the case. There are languages without nouns, languages with only two colors, languages with no tenses to differentiate time, etc.
Maybe twitter meant "it's a universal symbol that resonates across cultures which derive from the european middle ages"
Twitter does a weird thing where they crop the top and bottom of photos, requiring you to click it to see more of the image. For 140 character posts, somehow the twitter design has ended up as an cumbersome and cluttered webpage.
Interesting to think about how similar Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, and Ello are. Knowing how easily any user base can jump ship if one starts to go down, others are ready to pick up the deserters in a heartbeat.
I'm bummed. I used stars as a "save-for-later" feature. I like the idea of having the option to explicitly endorse something you like, but I will miss the bookmark functionality. Even Facebook has a "save" feature (a little hidden in a menu, but that's ok for me) and they seem to use it effectively for engagement purposes.
If it were that simple, they wouldn't write a post about their justification for choosing a heart over a star, and changing it from favorite to like. They expect the underlying behavior/use to change, or they wouldn't have bothered making such a significant change to a core feature.
In most other social networks Sharing has the connotation that this will post the content to another social network, not propagate it within it. Sharing on Facebook is self-contained, but not always.
But I know, my point is that this is not a functional change, but a change in name and iconography that will affect behavior.
They wouldn't have changed it, if they didn't think it would change the behavior to be what they desire (more new users using it).
But is that stopping YOU from behaving like that if you know it's literally just a change of icon? And if the change of icon bothers people that much, just install Tweetdeck. It's still a star in there (much like other inconsistencies across Twitter's apps/platforms).
Yes, it's likely to change my behavior because the change is so visible it makes me think about it, and the best interaction is one I don't have to think about.
Twitter has asked developers to update their apps to reflect the change, if you don't your app will be blocked, so, there's that.
So you are thinking about it right now. You haven't come to a decision yet on how your behavior would change? Why would you need to completely reconsider this every time you click the button?
If you're worried people might think you're endorsing tweets now, let me reassure you, people thought you were endorsing tweets before.
Well… duh. But, the thing is, I also want the reaction functionality. If somebody makes an hilarious comment I want her to know that I deeply appreciate his wit. But if somebody posts a long article about cats and I want to read it later I want to just bookmark it. See, I don't know if I like it because I haven't read it.
Not long before Twitter will blend in with Failbook and Instagram. A pity, but apparently neccessary as Twitter needs fresh cash.
The problem: the money is in the high-active users, not in the noobs using Twitter for an hour and then moving along. And a significant chunk of said high-active users will depart from Twitter because, like FB, the users haven't been consulted in any way...
edit: If Twitter REALLY wanted to improve its experience, it should...
1) fix tab-navigation to work like text->submitbutton, not text->media->navigation->poll->submitbutton
2) only auto-complete with tab when the current word begins with an @. No, if I just type "example"<tab> I DO NOT want a random user with "example" in the name expanded.
3) in the Android app, when I'm scrolling 2h behind and rt'ing a kitten image, I DO NOT want to jump right to the top and have to scroll aaaallll the way down again.
Twitter should have been bold and merged retweet and favorite into heart. Instead it's now more confusing which you should do. On other social networks hearts are kind of the redispersal mechanism, whereas I think what Twitter wants is more retweets -- more people introducing more people to each other.
My assumption on any changes Twitter makes is that it's powered by the hope of future ad revenue.
I see that potential for ads in Moments.
I would guess Hearts will get tweaked in the future to behave in a way that will make them something of value to brands (at least, Twitter hopes).
Similar to brands spending money for Facebook Likes (and thus getting their logos in people's feeds), I see Hearts as a first move towards a similar feature/concept.
Personally I like this change (as it is now) because I've only ever used stars as a "like" button, knowing people on the other end see that in their timeline. It's a very useful social tool for acknowledgement.
Favourite was the generic thing for acknowledging a post whether you like it, relate to it, or whatever...so now if someone has bad news (eg. someone dies) what do you do? 'like it'?
If nobody had said anything, I would have never noticed the change.
People are complaining and/or celebrating this change over some notion that it changes what the action "says". For people who agree that it changes what you are saying, they seem to universally agree it's changing from "I bookmarked this" to "I endorse this".
Here's the thing: if they weren't meant as endorsements before, then why was the list of them public, and why were they called "favorites"? Since when does publicly marking something as a "favorite" translate to a neutral "I am expressing no opinion on this matter, merely marking it for later retrieval"?
Because I can guarantee you: whenever you star/favorite/like/whatever-the-hell-we're-calling-it-today a tweet/post/blog/picture/whatever-site-we're-on-today in a public way with notification back to the original poster, it always gets interpreted as interest/enjoyment/endorsement.
It's literally nothing more than changing the icon. Same button, different color. It does the same thing: make a public notice that you touched that button on that tweet. If you weren't using it for what it was meant for before, you can continue to use it against what it's meant for today.
There was nothing worse than allowing to make tweets viral by gaming people into voting: "retweet if you agree, star if you disagree." Retweeting a tweet makes it infinitely more popular than starring. It does look like twitter has started rolling out a proper polling feature.
Hopefully I'm not the only person who spent a good 10 seconds staring at this heart/circle/play-icon hybrid thinking it was supposed to be the new icon being unveiled:
I assume that’s in line with them adding the birthday field on user profiles. People used to Facebook will like more tweets than with the previous star/favorite system and thus provide more accurate data for ads.
I've seen them testing this and the icon style changes for months now, having had three different test screens spread over three different accounts. On mobile.
Honestly this addition was so seamless I thought it had always been that way. Definitely liked a few things on twitter before I realized what I was doing.
If you click the link to the twitter username at the top of that article, you get to a page which still shows the favourites star rather than the full twitter feed with hearts
That's a heck of a lot of words for a tiny semantically void change. A more cynical me would assume a whole bunch of product people at twitter are well familiar with justifying their job in the face of obvious uselessness.
I don't use Twitter, but this sounds more confusing now. Stars are used throughout other services or systems for favoriting something such as bookmarks and if I "star it", I can revisit it in the future. But that means only I can see it.
Hearts on Instagram are broadcasted to my followers, Facebook likes as well. Is this also the case on Twitter now?
There's a difference between saving something for personal recollection and also broadcasting it.
