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Comment by Shog9 | Hacker News Reader

A week in, could easily be attributed to the Hawthorne effect; [0] if the trend continues after a month or longer, might be worth talking about.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect

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I agree with your assertion that the increase is at least in part due to the fact that the feature is new, but I think this would more aptly be classified as the novelty effect. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novelty_effect

Yeah, possibly. I saw an awful lot of favoriting immediately after the introduction seemingly meant as sort of a commentary on the change itself - explicitly favoriting to show support for favoriting. But either way, interesting to see if the trend continues.

Not sure the Hawthorne effect can be used here although I understand what you mean.

Most probably it's more just simply the news media effect. And yes you are right, it's going to be more interesting if this stays up.

Not sure if this is related to the Hawthorne effect, but I could easily see more traffic with liking just due to the fact that it's new and fancy. Maybe a significant number of people noticed the change and clicked the heart a few times just for fun.

Yes, would be interesting to see a comparison of new Twitter users before and after. Not that they only care about new users, but the data would be more pure at this stage.

It's promising anyway, considering the number of people who were internet-outraged at the time.

I was thinking it's probably an effect along similar-but-not-quite-Hawthorne lines where it's "ooh -- I can like things on Twitter now! New! Cool!"

I think there is definitely some of this at play. That being said, it is a totally sensible update to the semantics of twitter and I think still worthwhile.

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