If Twitter users want to respond to a tweet, they have three options: reply to it, retweet it, or mark it with a symbol of approval. Over the past couple of weeks, Twitter has begun changing that symbol from a star to a heart, and the word the symbol represents from “Favorite” to “Like.”
On its blog, the company gave an explanation for the momentous shift:
We want to make Twitter easier and more rewarding to use, and we know that at times the star could be confusing, especially to newcomers. You might like a lot of things, but not everything can be your favorite.
That would seem to be a reasonable position, albeit a tad condescending and literal-minded. But it was definitely not perceived as reasonable by a substantial body of Twitter users, who turned out to be really attached to the star. They protested that it was capable of expressing a far broader spectrum of meaning than the heart. The main coloring lost, tweeters asserted, was irony:
The discussion was carried out with a level of nuance and, indeed, irony that was impressive given the 140-character limit. But I have to admit that I remain unconvinced about the gravity of the change, and the outcry seems to me an instance of the narcissism of small differences. Bottom line: You can heart/like a tweet just as ironically as star/favoriting it.
But the tilde? That is a different story. People have taken to putting tildes on either side of a word — like ~this~ — to indicate, well, here’s what Joseph Bernstein had to say in a January post on BuzzFeed:
The most common usage of bracketing tildes — or at least the one I see the most in my digital-media-heavy, arch, sincerity-averse Twitter feed — is used to signify a tone that is somewhere between sarcasm and a sort of mild and self-deprecatory embarrassment over the usage of a word or phrase. …
one special power of the tilde is to let the enclosed words perform both sincerity (I sincerely want to share this with you) and irony (Man are we both sick of people who share or what?) without a cynical effect. It may be the only gesture on the Internet, short of a many-thousand-word think piece, that can synthesize snark and smarm into something … else.
Just before the Twitter change, the productivity/messaging app service Slack snatched the tilde away from its users. Now, if you put tildes around a word in Slack, the word will appear in strikethrough. @SlackHQ tweeted.
The BuzzFeed senior editor Katie Notopaulos was unimpressed, noting: “Strikethrough humor is sooooooo 2010.” She tweeted a poll about the change, as follows:
It’s unclear how many of the nine hearts her tweet got were ironic.