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.
