The like button, a popular alternative to retweets on Twitter, may be going away eventually. The social media giant is considering removing the ‘like’ feature as a way to improve the quality of debate. This was revealed in a report by the Telegraph, which states that this notion came directly from Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.
At a private event with employees last week, Dorsey reportedly stated that he was not a fan of the heart-shaped button and plans to do away with it “soon.”
“Right now we have a big Like button with a heart on it and we’re incentivizing people to want [the number of likes] to go up,” Dorsey reportedly said. “Is that the right thing? Versus contributing to the public conversation or a healthy conversation? How do we [incentivize] healthy conversation?”
Twitter officially responded in a tweet, neither confirming nor denying the story. Rather, the company states that it is rethinking everything about its service and have no current plans to share with the public.
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. https://t.co/k5uPe5j4CW
— Twitter Comms (@TwitterComms) October 29, 2018
The ‘like’ button is still relatively new, and was introduced back in 2015. As the name implies, it allows users to show support for tweets they enjoyed, not dissimilar from the retweet function. Unlike the retweet button, however, likes aren’t shared on the user’s own timeline for others to see.
Twitter has experienced scrutiny in recent months over whether it is capable of protecting users from targeted harassment. It’s difficult to say whether the removal of the ‘like’ button may invite users to shy away from online abuse. Still, there’s no doubt that the entire Twitter population would feel the effects should it ever come to pass.
