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Comment by cvburgess | Hacker News Reader

I never understood the "bookmarking" feature that was favoriting. Hearts/likes/kudos are pretty universally accepted as a way of showing support without having to engage with a comment/response. This was long overdo IMO.

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What, then, is your workflow for when you are reading through tweets, see someone you follow/respect post a url to an interesting article you'd like to read later? Or perhaps post a quote you'd like to use later?

Copy/paste the url into another tab, then bookmark it? Favoriting tweets for later review is a substantially more convenient workflow.

> Favoriting tweets for later review is a substantially more convenient workflow.

So, you favorite it, read the article later and then unfavorite? If you don't unfavorite, how do you differentiate between a bunch of links int he past week that you may/may not have read?

If I want to read something later, I add it to my "Read It Later" service of choice: Pocket.

I often would favorite tweets that I would like to reference later. An interesting article or a perspective on some event happening. I wouldn't go so far as to bookmark individual tweet pages, but clicking the favorite icon was an easy-enough way to ensure I'd be able to find what I was looking for later. Just load my favorites page and Ctrl+F.

Practically, I haven't had a problem. I remember there was an article I wanted to read, I go to my list of favorited tweets, and I find it.

Dedicated read-it-later services just end up being a list of articles I haven't read and feel bad about.

> Dedicated read-it-later services just end up being a list of articles I haven't read and feel bad about.

It used to be for me, too. Now I'm much more loose about marking something as read without reading it.

To be honest i click the article and instagram or pocket that instead of the tweet. I used favorite for things I liked.

You still can access a list of tweets you have liked, so this workflow hasn't really changed. It is just a long overdue change to the semantics.

This is true, but the meaning is completely different. I'm not going to "like" a tweet about, say, refugees being slaughtered, even if I might find the read interesting.

Save to Pocket

Same here.

I often thought "This is a good tweet... but why should I favorite something on Twitter?!"

I use favs/likes with IFTTT to save twitter links to other services.

I think the phrase "favorite" was to be read as "things that are my favorite" -- it was never used by the userbase as a bookmarking mechanism.

I think assuming it wasn't used as a bookmarking mechanism is being a bit shortsighted. Myself and many others in my circles used it as a bookmarking tool as well as to show support of something someone said.

A study last year found a 3:1 ratio of people liking vs bookmarking. http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~pszmw/pubs/icwsm2014-favouriting.p... [PDF]

It contains an interesting link you would want to read later? Pinboard can import favorited tweets and automatically store them as unread bookmarks, for example.

Well, I got my own bookmarks for that :\

The problem is that favoriting has historically been associated with bookmarking. It is never really taken in the literal sense of the word online. Hearts/Likes does not work in so many situations. I won't heart something that is negative, but would have fav'd it as a bookmark. Heart/likes is only a marketing solution to go after new users. It's not the power users tool.

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