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Twitter Changes Favorites (Stars) to Likes (Hearts), Prompts Massive Outrage


Stashed in: Twitter!, LIKE

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I star things to remind me to check them out later and not necessarily because I "like" them.  the way you have a heart and stash makes it easy for me to review later and also like if I do indeed  like it.

Right, saving something (STASH) is different from liking something (HEART).

Twitter just retroactively changed the semantics of a 9 year old feature. 

Twitter joins Instagram, Pinterest, Imgur, and Tumblr in using heart to mean LIKE. 

Twitter on Tuesday replaced its “favorite” button with a heart. The company said the move was designed to make the social network more intuitive for new users, some sizable number of whom were apparently flummoxed by the idea of a star. (Maybe they don’t give out stars in pre-school anymore?) 

“We want to make Twitter easier and more rewarding to use, and we know that at times the star could be confusing, especially to newcomers,” the company said in a statement posted to their Web site. “You might like a lot of things, but not everything can be your favorite.”

It’s an interesting shift: Twitter is arguably playing catch-up to a Facebook “like” model—just as that much larger social-media network is reportedly getting ready to expand beyond the “like” into “dislikes” and more. But “favorites” on Twitter meant many things: there was the snide “hate fave,” in which a user favorited something that user did not “like,” a flirty “fave,” and, perhaps most useful, a “fave” that meant, “I see that you replied to my tweet, but we’re done here.”

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