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Comment by r3bl | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

Wow. Really?

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Honestly, it was for me when I started with twitter for real in 2010 (my account is from 2006, but I haven't really used it until 2010). It was unclear to me whether I should be using this as a kind of bookmark-feature as a help for me to remember tweets to get back to or whether this was a social signal I'd be sending to the author of the tweet.

The would make that much more clear to me, though of course, I have since learned how to use twitter properly (I hope).

I have always used favs as tweet bookmarks.

Firefox, Chrome, GMail, etc. also use stars for bookmarks.

I'm surprised people associate stars with bookmarks (people still bookmark websites?) rather than a seal of approval.

Both Chrome and Firefox use a star icon as a shortcut to bookmark a page. I find it more surprising that you don't think people still bookmark websites. What do you use to remember links to pages you might want to visit again in the future?

You can often type some text that you remember from the URL or title in the URL bar and browsers will search the history and present you a set of pages you visited including the one you want.

Effectively it's like bookmarking everything and then using the keyboard to navigate among the bookmarks.

Normal bookmarks are still necessary if you need to record a set of multiple pages that meet some criteria.

>You can often type some text that you remember from the URL or title in the URL bar and browsers will search the history and present you a set of pages you visited including the one you want.

This fails to work for those of us who regularly clear browser history (e.g on shutdown), or bookmark articles from blog sites, or maybe the random URL of a site we've never visited that we're saving for later.

> people still bookmark websites?

What? Who _doesn't_ bookmark websites?

I used to, but the increasing amount of 404ing in my bookmark collection led me to stop trusting that I could get back to something with it. I think I'd prefer a "whole page snapshot" rather than a bookmark.

To prevent 404'ing an Archive service can be used. But I feel that is a little abusive to archive the page then bookmark the archive, so I take whole page screenshots. :)

In Firefox: Shift+F2 --> 'screenshot --fullpage'

I use evernote's web clipper for that purpose, works pretty well for what I need it to do.

Any page I want to bookmark, I commit to the Internet Archive, and then bookmark that page.

I only bookmark a page when I want to add extra tags to find it by that don't appear in its URL or title. Otherwise, Firefox's "awesomebar" does an excellent job of finding what I want out of my history.

The shitload of people typing in "facebook" in the Google search bar m(

I bookmark all of my work documentation from different sites. Saves me if I ever clear out my browser history, I'm not struggling to find links again

I have over 5K bookmarks, I mean I might be an exception but if a site has some interesting content/ideas I will bookmark it to its appropriate category folder.

There is no other good way to bookmark a tweet in the mobile app.

Oh yes! I needed to perform some quick maintenance on my phone just after my first use of twitter but I'd forgotten to close the app and it took 10 minutes to work out why I couldn't get my Torx screwdriver to undo all the little screws in the screen!

Thankfully after today's change to hearts I feel much more comfortable to provide Twitter with more accurate interest metrics so that they might monetise my preferences more intelligently and thereby serve me ads more targeted to my needs.

EDIT: Oh fine, here's the /s

EDIT 2: Jeez, we don't do light hearted rambunctious rib-tickling round here then? Not even for such silly and transparent changes by a company desperately flapping around to improve it's monetisation? We do all see this is because of ads, right? This isn't for the users benefit, the thing works exactly the same way, Twitter just wants us to actually use it so they can get better data. That's worth a little jibe.

I assume they have data to back that claim up. And I can understand it. Putting all the knowledge and assumptions you have as person who (presumably) uses Twitter and is generally tech-savvy: what would a person assume a "star" button does?

It was confusing to me. "Wait... I'm favoriting it? What does that mean? I mean I like it but, why favorite the tweet? Will I want to come back to this tweet later? What's the point? Should I just retweet it? I don't like it that much that I want to RT it, and I don't want to spam my followers."

Maybe I over think things but, it was a bit confusing to me.

Yea, it was a huge problem.

People associate the star icon with "bookmark" or "save for later" ala Chrome/Firefox/etc.

Then when they discover that it means "favorite" they basically don't use it because "favorite" is a singular thing, or at least an extremely strong emotion.

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