Twitter Is Replacing The Fav Star With A Stupid Heart

Twitter Is Replacing The Fav Star With A Stupid Heart

Whyyyyyy, Twitter? Why are you messing with a good thing? Today, Twitter replaced the age-old favourite star with a heart. A heart!

Clicking the new heart feels disgusting. It’s not even representative of how people use the fav: In addition to the concept of liking things, a fav can be a form acknowledgement, a way of saving a tweet for later. This is all much different than “loving something.” I do not heart this change.

This is a great example of dumbing down a product’s user experience in an attempt to rope in new users. Over the past year, we’ve watched as Twitter’s growth has slowed to the point that investors are ditching their stock. People simply aren’t signing up. Twitter needs to “act,” and for Jack Dorsey, whose post as interim COE was recently made permanent, this is action.

More officially, the company elaborated its thinking in poopy marketing speak:

The heart, in contrast, is a universal symbol that resonates across languages, cultures, and time zones. The heart is more expressive, enabling you to convey a range of emotions and easily connect with people. And in our tests, we found that people loved it.

People loved it? Who are these people?

Not to be hyperbolic, but this “heart” makes regular users like me want to vomit on our keyboards. Of course, there is blowback basically every time a well-established service changes anything fundamental about its user experience. We’ll all get used to it.

I suppose it’s the natural progression of things: Let’s make sure that all communication on the internet is an oozy mass of pandering smegma.


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