The Red Heart for ‘Like’ Is a Problem

Dave Winer:

On Facebook, there is no Heart for liking. They use a thumb-up. A lot of thought must have gone into this. We like things we don’t actually like, and shrug off the confusion. But labeling it with a red heart pushes it further.

Example: You may have Favorited something about a terrorist group, but would you have clicked on a red heart? At the very least that’s going to take some getting used to.

A lot of people, including me, have used “favorite” on Twitter both for marking tweets we liked/enjoyed, and as a sort of bookmark for tweets we simply want to refer to later. Using a red heart implies affection in a way that a star — or even a thumbs-up — does not.

This wouldn’t be a problem if Twitter were new, or, if Likes were a new feature that replaced Favorites. But that’s not what they’re doing — they’re renaming “Favorites” to “Likes”, which means every tweet you’ve favorited/starred in the last nine years is now liked/hearted instead.

★ Wednesday, 4 November 2015