Last week, a thing changed on the Internet, and lots of people had very strong feelings about it. Specifically, Twitter changed its “favorite” button to “like” and changed its star icon to a heart—and people did not like it. Or, at least, long-time Twitter users were thrown off, but Twitter says the change has been helpful overall.
In fact, it’s caused the feature’s use to increase by about 6%:
“With the change from favorites to likes we’ve seen a 6% increase in like activity in just the first week.” –@kevinweil
— Robi Ganguly (@rganguly) November 10, 2015
Meanwhile, people who think everyone should just retweet things they like instead of “liking” them with the button find themselves mysteriously 6% more annoyed this week. Unless everyone suddenly got better at Twitter (one look at Twitter will dispel that notion), the switch seems to have been effective.
The reason behind the change was that “like,” whether due to Facebook’s ubiquity or not, is a more easily understandable action than “favorite.” That’s how Twitter’s senior vice president of product, Kevin Weil, put it at today’s Open Mobile Summit in San Francisco, according to TechCrunch. As someone who’s witnessed Twitter users asking why people “favorite things” and arguments over whether the fave button should even be used at all, “like” seems as good a choice as any.
As for the icon change, which you can totally undo or otherwise mess with if you want, Weil said, “The heart is a universal symbol. It’s a much more inclusive symbol.” I don’t know in what way a heart is a more universal symbol for “good job on this” than a gold star, but … OK. As far as “inclusive,” there are maybe other things Twitter needs to work on in that respect that have little to do with meaningless validation buttons.
(via The Next Web)
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