Twitter is reportedly thinking of removing the like button from the social network. At a Twitter event recently, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey admitted that he wasn’t a big fan of the heart-shaped like button, and the company “could be getting rid of it soon,” according to a report from Telegraph.
The company is thinking of removing the like button to help increase positive, healthy conversations on the platform. It’s only one of the few things the company is working on to help users have more positive conversations on the platform. And although some of those features are quite promising, removing the like button doesn’t sound like a good idea at all.
Twitter has responded to the Telegraph’s report, claiming that the company doesn’t have any plans to kill the like button right now. On a tweet, the company said that it’s “rethinking everything” about the service — including the like button — to incentivize healthy conversation, and it’s still in the “early stages.”
As we've been saying for a while, we are rethinking everything about the service to ensure we are incentivizing healthy conversation, that includes the like button. We are in the early stages of the work and have no plans to share right now. https://t.co/k5uPe5j4CW
— Twitter Comms (@TwitterComms) October 29, 2018
Not only will removing the like button mean you simply won’t be able to “like” content on the platform, but you also wouldn’t be able to use it support others, or agree with something in an argument. The like button has a wide variety of uses, with some users even using the feature to save their favourite tweets. Removing the feature to help “incentive healthy conversation” would mean retweets will be the only way of any sort of communication on the platform.
Here’s the thing: there are a plenty of other, obvious ways of helping positive conversations take on Twitter, like banning nazis or taking user reports seriously, for example. Twitter also needs to understand that political Twitter isn’t the only thing happening in the platform, and some of its changes aren’t going to help most of the other “communities” or parts of Twitter.
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