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Twitter Plans To Remove 'Like' Button in a Bid To Improve the Quality of Debate, Report Says (telegraph.co.uk)
Twitter is planning to remove the ability to "like" tweets in a radical move that aims to improve the quality of debate on the social network, UK news outlet The Telegraph (paywalled) reports, citing CEO Jack Dorsey's comments at a recent company event. From the report: Founder Jack Dorsey last week admitted at a Twitter event that he was not a fan of the heart-shaped button and that it would be getting rid of it "soon." The feature was introduced in 2015 to replace "favourites," a star-shaped button that allowed people to bookmark tweets to read later. Update: In a statement, Twitter neither confirmed nor denied the report, adding that it was indeed in the process of rethinking "everything." It said, "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."
You are the product.
Exercise for the student: who are the users?
Check your premises.
The problem is that the "Like" button wasn't technically an "I appove" button, but a "keep me informed about the tweet" button. Thus people who wanted to stay informed, had to "like" something they might not approve of, e.g. a hurrican made landfall and a tweet about damages and evacuations was something you definitely wanted to know, but that doesn't mean you approve to the hurrican making landfall or the way evacuations were executed.
I'm wondering what the problem with the "like" button is?
Could it be that too many people are liking the "wrong" things?
Perhaps too many people are liking things that go against the political bent of the Twitter owners/management believe in?
Who knows. I'm still trying to wrap my head around the concept of Twitter and "quality of debate".
Twitter is not a place for debate, and in no way shape or form does quality of anything have anything to do with the place.
It is however, a fine place for intellectually or emotionally challenged individuals to spout off within the limitations of their ability. Any thing that comes in a nutshell belongs in one.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.