Why I’ll Miss the Twitter Fave

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There's a decent chance that changing the "favorite" button, represented by a star, to a "like" button, represented by a heart, will help turn Twitter’s fortunes around. Not from a user-experience point of view, but from a business point of view: By simplifying and clarifying one of the three main ways to interact with a tweet, Twitter is hoping it's made itself more friendly to new users. And by lowering the threshold for acting ("liking" is much lower-pressure than choosing a "favorite"), there's a good chance Twitter could increase the number of overall interactions with its content, which is, despite how boring it sounds, great (for Twitter’s ability to sell partnerships and advertisements).

Since most of the time I'd like Twitter to be a lasting social network, I'm not going to complain too much. But I'm sympathetic to the complainers who flooded Twitter as soon as the news was announced. Since it's largely public (as opposed to the semi-private worlds of Facebook and Instagram) and mostly text-based, Twitter has always seemed just a little bit weirder than its social-network peers, and its stubborn insistence on the star and the fave when nearly every other platform used the unambiguous (and stultifying) "like" had a kind of foreign-exchange-student charm to it. And the fave's ambiguity was both useful and fitting: Twitter's weirdness arises partly from the difficulty of reading tone in short snippets of text. The fave — a hate-fave? A like fave? A favorite fave? An acknowledgment fave? — has the same interestingly ambivalent quality.

But for Twitter to build a sustainable business it needs to attract people for whom that weirdness isn't actually a selling point, and the "like" will help them do that. And the clear meaning and lower threshold for liking something will mean that even "power users" and fanatics will begin to use it with the same cavalier attitude that they do on Facebook and Instagram. And this is why an essential part of the Twitter experience is going to be lost: Because the best way to browse Twitter is through other people's favorites.

Unlike Facebook or Instagram, where likes are technically public but only ever seen at algorithmically determined (and often embarrassing) times, every user's Twitter favorites are easily accessible. For this reason, some people regard favoriting on Twitter as equally important to the cultivation of their online persona as actually tweeting. I have friends for whom the assigning of faves is a momentous occasion, to be remarked upon. Buzzfeed once wrote an article about the fave lists of official news organization Instagram accounts.

But, for me, the always-public fave list is the best way to browse Twitter. I've followed too many people and am too lazy to create a decent Twitter experience for myself; the vast majority of tweets, even from the funniest or smartest accounts, are just noise. Twitter has attempted to solve some of these problems by serving up an algorithmically chosen selection of tweets from "while you're away" — or, worse, by collecting themed tweets into ill-conceived "moments" — but it's bafflingly unhelpful in the way that algorithmically generated curation always is. The public fave lists of friends and people I'm following are always more interesting, useful, and odd than whatever Twitter thinks I want to see, and they introduce me to more new people and ideas than Twitter ever has, either.

I don't have a system, really: Sometimes I'll dip into the faves of a new follower, to get a sense of who this person is and why they've followed me; sometimes I'll browse through the faves of a favorite tweeter, to see what a smart or funny person is reading or liking today. As a rule of thumb the best people to read are those who read Twitter frequently but tweet less often (so you don't get clogged running through the "acknowledgment" faves of replies); acquaintances and people in different industries are always good to find stuff you wouldn't otherwise see.

I have standbys: My old co-workers Caity Weaver (now a staff writer at GQ) and Tom Scocca (Gawker Media's executive features editor) both have discerning and exacting taste, and their faves are true badges of quality. On the other end of the spectrum, fave gadflies like Choire Sicha (founder of the Awl) or the comedian Jon Hendren (@fart) are more generous, but their lists no less interesting. I don't expect these accounts to work for everyone as go-to Twitter aggregators: Part of the beauty of the fave-list-as-Twitter-portal is its idiosyncrasy and personality. Self-described internet "curators" tend to get a deservedly bad rap, but this is curation at its best. 

And I'm worried that the proliferation of the easy-to-distribute like, whose value has been diminished by our familiarity with its use as a general and semi-private tool for approval, will ruin the fave as passive curation. I hold out hope that it won't. Certainly, it hasn't changed the force of my personal favorite fave list — "like" list, sorry: that of infamous nonsense comedy account @dril: