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Comment by __abc | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only person who hasn't changed how I use that button?? It's what I use to "mark" a tweet so I can easily come back and either read/refer to it later.

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I read that Marc Andreessen used favorites the same way to let the people who tweeted to him know that he read their tweets or check their product page etc.

The side effect of this behavior was that it sent a signal to the community that "Marc Andreessen" "Favorited" this page/product/tweet which could have surprising effect. I was at a receiving end of this and it brought a hoard of viewership/followers/favorites.

I also use it to acknowledge a tweet that I don't want to reply to or RT.

That's what I do. I don't care what the button says, it's a positive acknowledgment of the post and that's how I use it.

It's trickier with Facebook, and it might be the same with Twitter if I used it for personal interactions, because on Facebook I see a lot of "my family member died" and 'like' is not entirely appropriate for that.

Not, you're not the only person who uses it the same way. Indeed, it's incomprehensible to me that people would intentionally change how they use something that they know is functionally identical just because it has a different image and word associated with it. I can see how the change might have a more subtle, subconscious influence over the long term.

Suppose they renamed it to "Hate" and made the icon a skull or something, but kept the functionality the same. I bet you (and others) would use it differently, not only because of the psychological difference for you but also because of the difference in how other people will likely react to "voyou Hated this" rather than "voyou Liked this".

"Like" versus "Favorite" is a much smaller change, of course, as is "heart" versus "star" -- but they're still changes. Why shouldn't they have an effect?

Why would anyone change something if it wasn't supposed to have any effect?

Most people don't follow stuff like this very closely. Does the average person actually know it's functionally identical? I might not if I hadn't read about it here, at least not right away. If nothing else I would like something just to see what happens.

Most people don't realize that Liking on Tumblr bookmarks things in a list (a public list, unless you disable it!) either. Or that liking a conversation on Facebook causes you to follow it (people usually think you have to comment; "commenting to follow" is a very common phrase.)

Over time, social media platforms have effectively converged on the same basic set of verbs, with each verb doing everything all its parents did. But people still think of the verb as being the same one the platform started with, and limit their use to that use-case. I think it can be smart to switch from a "dialect" verb signifies to a "common loan-word" one, precisely to get people to take notice that the verb really has done more than they thought for a while now.

I haven't changed how I use that button... I'd always used it as if it were "like", as do most Twitter users I know.

You've just described the difference between the two for me. Favouriting a tweet implied that I wanted to reference back to it later, whereas liking a tweet to me conveys that I don't really care to come back to it later but I want to show my appreciation for it without retweeting it.

I think that approach to using the button fell out of favor a while ago. That is definitely how I used Twitter in the past, but now its more of a "read this, enjoyed it, didn't feel need to respond further"

That's interesting. I never thought of it like that. In fact, I didn't even know there was a simple way to see all your past favorites.

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