5 Years Ago: Twitter Changed Faves To Likes
Today in 2015, Twitter Replaced the Star Button with a Heart Button
Five years ago today, Twitter announced it was changing Faves to Likes. This change involved nothing more than swapping out one icon out for another. Nonetheless, people were pissed.
Let’s be specific. An extremely small segment of Twitter users were pissed, and most of those users had Twitter accounts before 2007. But this rowdy early-adopter minority could make quite the fuss.
Why kill faves?, they hollered. Twitter’s answer was simple: the threshold for favoriting a tweet was too high; plus, the star icon was confusing new users.
To be fair to the dissenters, that rationale was bullshit. The real reason for the change, which Twitter could never admit, was that Facebook called them Likes and used a heart icon. Adopting the jargon of the much bigger platform made Twitter more accessible to the many people who still didn’t get Twitter.
Diehard Twitter users disagreed. A favorite was special; a like, a mere trifle! And they screamed aplenty.
The distinction seems pretty silly today, unless you are one of those fifteen people still dying on that hill (hello friends!). But the whole incident reminded me of other instances where hardcore users became slightly unhinged about a small design change. Here is an abridged timeline of select redesigns that have infuriated users:
Jan 2019: Slack introduced a new logo and people lost their shit.
Nov 2017: Twitter changed the character limit from 140 to a 280 and people lost their shit.
Aug 2017: Medium introduced claps as a replacement for likes and people lost their shit.
May 2016: Instagram introduced a new logo and people lost their shit.
July 2014: Airbnb introduced a new logo and people lost their shit.
My selective editing of that list might be unfair. To be sure, the internet is rife with unwise redesigns. There was the infamous v4 Digg redesign of 2010, for instance, which famously precipitated a user secession and the rise of Reddit. There was Netflix’s truly boneheaded idea in 2011 to change its DVD rental service name to Qwikster. And, perhaps most infamously, Facebook’s introduction of the Newsfeed in 2006 is still cited by many as the reason everything bad on the internet has happened ever since.
What redesigns really pissed you off? Leave a comment and let me know what dumb mistakes these platforms have done to rile you up.
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