In addition to the meaning intended by developers, users add their own meaning to social buttons, developing them into important interactional tools. The value users ascribe to these seemingly simple expressions are not always easy to interpret. Although driven by a desire to make Twitter and Facebook easier and more rewarding to use, feedback from users show that the way social buttons such as Likes and favourites are used in practice may differ from how developers of social media may have originally intended. According to Teehan, the idea with extending the Like button was to “allow people to give feedback in more expressive ways that better align with the varied ways we react to things in real life” as “not everything in life is Likable” (Teehan, 2016).ĢThese so-called “social buttons” are sometimes referred to as social bookmarking icons that allow users to “share, recommend, like or bookmark content, posts and pages across various social media platforms” (Gerlitz & Helmond, 2013, p. 1351). In a blog post, Product Design Director at Facebook, Geoff Teehan, explained the reasons behind the development of the extension of the Like button into ‘Reactions’ (Teehan, 2016). Over time, however, the Like button has evolved. The Like button was initially introduced as an alternative to the comment function, allowing Facebook users to express their fondness of other users’ posts “with a simple click” (Pearlman, 2009). A function similar to the favourite button on Twitter is the Like button on Facebook, which quickly became an important part of the social media landscape. It was stated that “favoriting something on Twitter is not the same thing as liking it” (Whitten, 2015). Also, some suggested that the replacement of symbols were going to raise issues as the favourite button had been used to bookmark interesting tweets, not necessarily “liking’ the actual content, but rather just wanting to save the tweet to read or return to later on. Some were worried, and highlighted that up until this point, the star icon used for favouriting a tweet was one of the key features setting Twitter apart from Instagram and Facebook. While most Twitter users adapted to the icon replacement without resistance, others were less happy with the changes. According to Twitter representatives, this was done in an attempt to make Twitter “easier and more rewarding to use” claiming that “the heart is more expressive” and “easily connect with people” (Kumar, 2015). 1On November 3rd 2015, Twitter users opening up the app were greeted by the news that the star icon, previously used to mark a tweet as a favourite, had been replaced by a heart icon.
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