Twitter replaces its star icon, and the Twitterverse doesn’t ‘heart’ it

Well this change isn’t going so well. On Tuesday, suddenly Twitter switched out its star “fav” icon for a “like” heart ... and the bewildered and nasty tweets came pouring in.

“Twitter’s ‘favorite’ button, the service’s primary way for users to signal agreement, acknowledgment, laughter, support, and occasionally (and perversely!) utter hatred, is officially dead,” said The Verge.

Here’s how Twitter explained the switch, which caught many Twitter users by surprise. The heart will also be used on Vine, Twitter’s six-second video app.

“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’s announcement said. “You might like a lot of things, but not everything can be your favorite.

“The heart, in contrast, is a universal symbol that resonates across languages, cultures, and time zones.”

The San Francisco company has been trying to make its service easier to use to attract the new users that it needs.

Twitter’s third quarter financials show that it registered just 320 million monthly active users in the last quarter, according to Engadget. That’s 11 percent growth over this time last year but only a marginal increase over the 316 million in the previous quarter.

Third-quarter revenue of $569 million was up 58 percent over last year’s third quarter, but a $132 million loss keeps Twitter in the red, Engadget reported.

As part of its campaign for new users, Twitter launched a channel last month that corrals videos, photos and news stories so users can find the hot topics of the day faster. The changes are attributed to co-founder Jack Dorsey, who was named permanent CEO last month.

In making the switch on Tuesday, Twitter said it tried out the heart icon in user tests and it did quite well.

But you couldn’t tell that from the immediate, largely negative reaction in the Twitterverse.

Even one Twitter employee wasn’t on board with the switch.

Many users argued that they used “favorites” in different ways — to acknowledge that they saw a tweet or even to bookmark it.

And just because they “favorited” something didn’t mean they liked it, many users complained.

“In other words, favs, as they came to be abbreviated, were one more instance of Twitter’s community understanding the power of the service more completely than the people who were building it,” wrote Casey Newton for The Verge.

“They added hashtags to organize content around keywords; retweets to spread content virally; and through brute force converted a near-useless bookmarking feature into a powerful multi-purpose tool. I’ve favorited more than 60,000 tweets over the years, and in that time I’ve come to appreciate how versatile that little button is.

“I use it as a kind of read receipt to acknowledge replies; I use it whenever a tweet makes me laugh out loud; I use it when someone criticizes me by name in the hopes that seeing it’s one of my ‘favorite’ tweets will confuse and upset them. It often works!”

The tech website GigaOm noted that “Twitter has steadily become more like Facebook over the last few years. It’s redesigned its profiles, emphasized photos, and removed the character limit from its direct messages. All of these changes make its service more welcoming to people who have only ever used Facebook as their primary social network.”

That might be true, but that’s exactly what upset some users on Tuesday.

The switch occurred on Tuesday for Twitter on iOS and Android, Twitter.com, TweetDeck, Twitter for Windows 10, embedded tweets on the web, and the Vine Android app and site.

Vine for iOS and Twitter for Mac updates are coming soon, according to TechCrunch.

GigaOm argues that the change won’t mean much “in the long run. People will complain about the change at first, then they’ll use it the same way they used the “favorite” button, and then a whole bunch of Twitter users will never know that button existed.”

This story was originally published November 3, 2015 at 2:06 PM with the headline "Twitter replaces its star icon, and the Twitterverse doesn’t ‘heart’ it."