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Twitter changed stars to hearts, and Twitter users went nuts

by Timothy B. Lee
Kitch Bain / Shutterstock

For years, if you liked a tweet you could click a little star icon to “favorite” it. But Twitter has decided that this concept is too confusing, so it’s rebranding it as a “like” button (that sounds familiar) and replacing the star with a heart:

This is part of a larger campaign by Twitter to expand the appeal of its social network. Twitter is extremely popular among journalists and the tech elite, but it has fallen far behind Facebook among ordinary users. Twitter has about 320 million users, compared with 1.5 billion Facebook users. That’s upsetting to Wall Street, which wants to see Twitter earn Facebook-like profits instead of the losses it’s been suffering quarter after quarter.

Twitter has been trying a variety of things to make itself more accessible, including a “moments” tab that displays curated collections of tweets about news stories and a “while you were away” feature that shows occasional users the most interesting tweets that appeared since they last logged in.

Unsurprisingly, lots of people on Twitter had opinions, and made jokes, about the change:

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