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Comment by janvdberg | Hacker News Reader

I think this is a rather significant change. Whereas before a favorite was the equivalent of a bookmark now it is more in line with the Facebook like or Instagram 'heart'. This is a clear push for more engagement. I personally like it. But I would still like to keep an option for bookmarking/read later (i.e. how I use the favorite button now).

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Objectively, it is a little weird for Twitter to have its own bookmarking function, with a nice convenient list that you (or anyone) can refer to.

But that's exactly how I use "favorite". It's really useful, whether it's a cute picture I want to share with someone later or something more informative. "Like" does nothing for me; I don't always want to imply approval by clicking that button.

I use it the same way. But there have also been many times that I want to ACKNOWLEDGE that I enjoyed/liked/laughed at a tweet without polluting my favorites. A like button does just that. However I don't like that they just switched the favorites over to likes. They should have added a new option and maybe hidden the favorite option a bit more (if it's that important to them).

Ditto. Mostly because I read Twitter while bored on my phone and want to investigate things later when I'm on a proper computer.

Evernote (or similar) serves this function well, even better than a "favorite" because I can save/clip things from other sources. i.e. when I have time to read all the things I thought looked interesting I only need to to go Evernote, not to multiple sites.

A long press on Twitter's native [Android] app and selecting "Share via..." will allow you to easily/quickly save it to Evernote (or whatever similar service you may use).

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.

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".

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.

In fact, we're looking right now at a site that mixes up the meanings of like and favourite with no apparent problem.

> 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.

I've generally seen "favorite" to mean "I don't disagree with you per se but I'm not going to reply"

I'd been using the Favorite as a Like/Heart already. I wonder how many people were using it as a bookmark.

A lot of people use it as a way to get your attention without retweeting the post to their feed. I've started getting an increase in what seems to be automated favoriting (now liking), which is so incredibly annoying that I have to end up muting those users.

When I first joined twitter I assumed that "favorites" were bookmarks and didn't realize that twitter notified users when you favorited a tweet.

It's interesting to me because Facebook just made the news recently for saying they'd try to come up with something akin to dislike because the "like" is too positive a sentiment for many situations (death of a relative, bad day at work, whatever). In the wake of that, Twitter didn't say "well the favorite is already neutral of emotions, and is more akin to showing support for the thing, positive or negative". Instead, they said "oooh, we want the problem Facebook is facing".

Lot of people used it as "shit user said"

There are a few services that work with Twitter to do this - Pocket comes to mind. I know their Chrome extension will place "Pocket" buttons on each tweet allowing you to save them for later. Similarly, a long button press on iOS will allow you to send a link from within Twitter to Pocket.

I disagree. It is wholly insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Twitter can't be fixed by putting so much thought into an icon - the core engagement of it is slightly broken. Chris Sacca had a great article on what is wrong with Twitter [1]. TLDR: changing stars to hearts won't move then needle.

The fact that they devoted an entire blog post to it makes me feel like they're headed in the wrong direction.

[1]: http://lowercasecapital.com/2015/06/03/what-twitter-can-be-2...

I'll keep using it as a bookmark anyway...

I'd rather they just gave me a better search of what's been on my timeline.

I just woke up, and seeing the new page threw me off. It does completely change the sentiment, and evoke a completely different set of idea to see tiny hearts rather than generic impersonal 'fav'icons.

That's already been the way people have been using the favstar on twitter. The difference now is that it'll be obvious to more people that this is the main purpose of the feature. That plus now it'll be slightly different if you want to "favorite" something that is negative (the "like" problem).

I'd argue most people were using it as a "like" anyway.

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