What evidence supports this claim ?
I disagree on a personal level. I used "favorites" almost exclusively to bookmark tweets and I have "unliked" all of my previous favorites because the meaning has drastically changed.
People do want to bookmark tweets. But Twitter reasoned (probably correctly) that people "like" a lot more tweets than they bookmark. Naturally, Twitter likes the idea of visible engagement, so they are encouraging people to do the lighterweight thing.
What's interesting is that I had already found my own behavior changing. For years I used 'favoriting' as bookmarking...but in the last year or so, I've changed and was already using it as a show of appreciation. I wonder if many other people were doing the same thing already.
that rings alarm bells of contradiction in my mind; i always use the favorite to bookmark tweets - and i notice a lot of my followers do the same. of course i want to bookmark them for reading later.
I used to star to read later. I now open the link into a browser and get to it later on. And I use the star a lot less than I would hit the heart on Instagram - and Twitter know that's a serious problem for them.
Now