
Twitter Sees 6% Increase in “Like” Activity After First Week of Hearts - zhuxuefeng1994
http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/10/twitter-sees-6-increase-in-like-activity-after-first-week-of-hearts/
======
tyre
> The reason? According to Weil, “It’s easier to understand.”

We aren't comparing apples to apples. It is a different button with different
meaning.

The barrier to my "liking" something is substantially lower than my
"favoriting" it. I understand both, but I'll do more of one than another.

The real question is what the goal is and whether user are getting more value
from more likes versus fewer favorites.

Are my interactions 6% more engaging? Does the quantity of interactions cover
the decrease in quality of meaning?

Subjectively, I don't feel like it. Favorites had more meaning to me than
Facebook likes precisely because there was a higher bar. They've diluted the
meaning of a term and are, unsurprisingly, seeing people use it more often.

~~~
__abc
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.

~~~
voyou
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.

~~~
drumdance
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.

~~~
derefr
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.

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Shog9
A week in, could easily be attributed to the Hawthorne effect; [0] if the
trend continues after a month or longer, might be worth talking about.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect)

~~~
Plough_Jogger
I agree with your assertion that the increase is at least in part due to the
fact that the feature is new, but I think this would more aptly be classified
as the novelty effect. [1]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novelty_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novelty_effect)

~~~
Shog9
Yeah, possibly. I saw an _awful_ lot of favoriting immediately after the
introduction seemingly meant as sort of a commentary on the change itself -
explicitly favoriting to show support for favoriting. But either way,
interesting to see if the trend continues.

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cvburgess
I never understood the "bookmarking" feature that was favoriting.
Hearts/likes/kudos are pretty universally accepted as a way of showing support
without having to engage with a comment/response. This was long overdo IMO.

~~~
vox_mollis
What, then, is your workflow for when you are reading through tweets, see
someone you follow/respect post a url to an interesting article you'd like to
read later? Or perhaps post a quote you'd like to use later?

Copy/paste the url into another tab, then bookmark it? Favoriting tweets for
later review is a substantially more convenient workflow.

~~~
sjs382
> Favoriting tweets for later review is a substantially more convenient
> workflow.

So, you favorite it, read the article later and then unfavorite? If you don't
unfavorite, how do you differentiate between a bunch of links int he past week
that you may/may not have read?

If I want to read something later, I add it to my "Read It Later" service of
choice: Pocket.

~~~
smackfu
Practically, I haven't had a problem. I remember there was an article I wanted
to read, I go to my list of favorited tweets, and I find it.

Dedicated read-it-later services just end up being a list of articles I
haven't read and feel bad about.

~~~
sjs382
> Dedicated read-it-later services just end up being a list of articles I
> haven't read and feel bad about.

It used to be for me, too. Now I'm much more loose about marking something as
read without reading it.

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robertp
6% is pathetic increase and stronger sign how little people engage on the
platform.

The engagement ratio of Instagram to Twitter is several orders of magnitude
off.

You look are Redbull on both platforms. Twitter they have average of 40
retweets and 150 likes/faves, plus some replies. Instagram they have 50-80k
likes and 100 to 1k comments.

Even if twitter had 1000% increase that would not help the platform where
there is so little active engagement.

~~~
kosievdmerwe
6% is a pretty substantial increase for just changing the icon and name of the
action. Hell it's a pretty substantial change in general for a feature that is
presented so prominently.

Either way, how do you propose Twitter gets to Instagram volumes other than
through lots of incremental changes? Instagram didn't get where it is today in
one fell swoop.

~~~
27182818284
>in one fell swoop.

Not all the way, but a team of 13 did pretty darn well in just two years--
enough that it then caused Facebook to make an offer

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jacquesm
I'm happy for them but I fail to see how a '6% increase in like activity' will
change the financial situation for twitter in any meaningful way, assuming
that this is not just a momentary up-tick (which is fairly common after any
change).

~~~
encoderer
Increasing engagement of new users makes Twitter more sticky? They don't have
a financial problem as much as a growth problem.

Ultimately, six percent is a significant movement and it's certainly not a bad
thing for the company.

~~~
SandB0x
> Increasing engagement of new users makes Twitter more sticky

"Engagement" seems to be one of those alternative metrics that companies point
to when they're not making actual money.

~~~
encoderer
I think you're being a little cynical. On boarding a user is not mystical. You
need them to begin using your product. And as they continue to use the product
they develop habits. No use? No habit.

That use is called engagement. It's not a marketing term, it's a product term
that's used in marketing.

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minimaxir
"6% increase in likes" can mean a few things in the statistical sense.

* 6% increase compared to the same time last year?

* 6% increase in WoW favorite/like activity?

* 6% increase in the probability that a given user will favorite/tweet a given tweet?

Granted, in all cases, 6% is a lot at Twitter's scale, although depending on
the metric used, it may not be proof that the change is unequivocally better.

~~~
kosievdmerwe
Or the most likely meaning: In the AB test, the group with the heart had 6%
more likes/favorites than the control group.

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wassago
Well, not like it's a surprise, they've A/B tested it, saw increase in CTR,
implemented.

~~~
smpetrey
I always understood "favoriting" to be like "saving" a post in reddit.
However, the digestabilibty of tweets are pretty much instantaneous so
"saving" them is without merit. So I understood the genesis of "hearting" or
"liking" to be very much so a re-branding of a highly adopted UI. Was this
move organized before @jack came back to Twitter?

~~~
n0us
I actually come back to a lot of saved Reddit posts, particularly ones on
programming subreddits where I can't easily read the article or mess with the
code on my phone.

~~~
taejo
That's the point - a Reddit post can be much more substantial than a tweet
usually is, so saving makes more sense for the former than the latter.

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sakopov
I'm sure a lot of folks will disagree with me but as someone who doesn't use
twitter i find this absolutely delusional. Even if you do use twitter I can't
imagine the perceived importance of this and all the media traction didn't get
at least a chuckle out of you.

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vsbuffalo
This isn't the most useful statistical figure. The heart feature is novel —
the increase could be due entirely to folks trying it out. A more meaningful
figure would be to look at the folks who have constant favoriting habits (with
stars that is) and see how their behavior changed. Personally, I'm more
reluctant to heart tweets, as my Twitter account is mostly professional and it
feels a bit unprofessional to "heart" a colleague's tweet.

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codva
I clicked a few just to see the animation. If a lot of people did that there
is your 6%.

~~~
yrochat
I clicked much more than one time (just to see the animation).

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mrmondo
Correlation != Causation. It's a highly visible change - users will be testing
it out and in many cases it seems - making fun of it.

In my opinion the main (not only) reason it feels familiar to people is
because of Facebook. Since when was it easier to understand the use of symbol
for 'love' towards 140 characters of text than use the symbol for 'favourite'?

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aerovistae
is this really news? I find this an embarrassing headline to top this site.
"Social Network X changes wording/icon on link, sees change of a few percent
in some direction over the course of a week, trend may change direction at any
time, we'll keep you posted"

DON'T CHANGE THAT CHANNEL!!

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krisdol
6% increase compared how? Week-over-week? Daily average? Gross average? How
much does it fluctuate each week? How likely is a 6% difference on any other
week? Has this been adjusted for variance?

I see nothing in this article other than two overly-verbose paragraphs
summarizing a couple of tweets.

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tolmasky
I want to know if it is at the expense of retweets. I'll say what I thought
before: Like vs. Retweet is now confusing (and I think detrimental to what
Twitter probably wants which is retweets since those increase engagement).
They should have renamed Retweet to like (people on other social networks
expect likes to show up on their friend's feeds), and either dropped favorite
altogether --or-- just make it a little bookmark icon! Like/Bookmark makes way
more sense to me than Retweet/Like.

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TazeTSchnitzel
I think stars were good _because_ they were vague. They had various meanings:
some used them like "likes", some used them as bookmarks, some used them
almost to acknowledge receipt, some used them to express empathy, some used
some combination of these (like me).

"Like" is much narrower. It's also at odds with its own symbol, ️<3 (goddamnit
HN please stop stripping emoji), which means "love", a more intense emotion
with different connotations.

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enginnr
I've yet to see heart/fave/star/like buttons being context aware. I've heard
anything from people using these mechanisms to read articles later, to using
them as attention grabbing devices used to steal eyeball hours from distracted
phone users, and everything in between. "Like" activity is a misleading metric
and could mean _anything_ because it's stripped and devoid of context.

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ericdykstra
A major part of the Twitter ad pricing formula includes "engagements"

If they can get more people to "engage" by clicking a heart instead of a star,
it's more revenue for them, even if it doesn't improve user experience at all.

Of course, there's a good chance the market for Twitter ads will correct, and
value an engagement lower if the new engagements don't lead to sales or click-
throughs or whatever metric.

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cechner
I probably fit into the camp of people who would 'like' but not 'favourite'.
BUT I am not a regular twitter user so perhaps my POV isn't that usual.

I think of 'favouriting' something as a kind of bookmark that I might want to
go back to some time. I know that's now how you use twitter, but this
definitely coloured my opinion.

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Blaaguuu
I would assume that a good chunk of that initial increased activity has less
to do with it being a better name/icon, and more to do with the increased
awareness/attention to the feature in general, due to all of the press around
the change... Will be more interesting to see the % of new users that make use
of it after a few months.

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Pxtl
When I first saw the twitter favourite feature, I'd assumed it was a "save
this tweet to review later for your list of favourites" since that's how the
term is used on other platforms. I quickly learned otherwise, but it is
definitely simpler if they just stick to existing conventions.

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darka
I'm surprised, I'm sure the number of likes would fall on Facebook if they
switched to using hearts.

People seem to have a personal/emotional attachment to the heart symbol, which
makes it suitable for social networks like Instagram, because you can love a
picture! But a Donald Trump status? Not so much.

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aianus
I don't know what took them so long.

Anecdotally I used to get more engagement on my tweets via the cross-post on
Facebook than I did on Twitter. The kicker -- I was working at Twitter and the
people liking them on Facebook but not faving them on Twitter also worked at
Twitter (!)

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gchokov
Epic nonsense.

~~~
tallerholler
completely agree

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tedd4u
I think success is probably better measured by the number of UUs receiving and
or giving likes than the sheer number of likes given. Still more is better all
other things equal.

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pearlsteinj
I'd be interested to see if this is just because it's new and novel or because
of some sort of human psychological difference. The latter would be really
interesting.

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djtriptych
I believe it's the latter, but there is no way I'm discussing that viewpoint
in here.

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dsschnau
that heart animation is flippin' cute, thats why

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thisisrobv
This seems potentially misleading without proper context, like... were
"favorites" growing before, if so at what rate?

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chrisra
Because people wanted to watch the little confetti splash, or observe the UI
break when clicking the heart too fast. :)

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wnevets
> The reason? According to Weil, “It’s easier to understand.”

or people just a new icon and wanted to see what it did.

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ebbv
That seems extremely low given the hype and attention this change got.

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cft
Time to buy their stock!

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yueq
Huge gain. But didn't they A/B test this before?

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mesozoic
Twitter just wishes they had a nickel for every like.

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mcs
the "love" button wasn't supposed to be "like"

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module17
Sex sells.

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andyl
Wow - that's pretty exciting. Great to see that Twitter is innovating again.

~~~
oldmanjay
This was literally just a reskin. I'm all for Twitter succeeding, but
classifying this as an innovation stretches the term til it snaps.

~~~
lifeformed
I read andyl's comment as one laced with extreme sarcasm.

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dreamdu5t
Get a fucking life. All of you. Who fucking cares!?

