Always nice to see the ‘competition’ removing features 
Hopefully FB will follow suit …
I would wait until this rolls out, because I am very skeptical that it will.
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Yeah it doesn’t make sense quite honestly - seems to me like a “grasping at straws” moment
It’s easy to interpret that in one of two ways, I think people have sensationalised the quote mostly for the clicks.
“not a fan of the heart-shaped button”
Either means:
- The ability to like tweets is going away
- Liking tweets can be expressed in a better other than a love heart.
If there’s any truth in the report it’s more likely that option two would be pursued. Twitter’s big currency right now is with social influencers and that side of their platform. Scrapping the most basic of responses would rapidly diminish one of the go-to metrics for engagement.
The only other comments have come from Twitter PR and they’re deliberately ambiguous.
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For context’s sake, there’s already a blog post on how Discourse aims to do better than Twitter:
https://blog.codinghorror.com/your-community-door/
This doesn’t mention likes, so I’ll mention the big difference between Discourse and Twitter:
- Discourse never sorts users, or posts, by likes. Liking a post doesn’t impact the post’s visibility at all.
- Likes do influence a user’s visibility, by raising rate-limits and unlocking features, but these do not grow without bound. Once you reach twenty, there’s no point in trying to get more.
- The number of likes that a user receives is buried under their profile, and shown alongside a bunch of other numbers, including the number of likes they’ve given.
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Right, in order for this to be an issue we’d have to show “x likes received” under everyone’s avatar. Which would I guess be marginally better than the classic forum trope of “x posts” showing under everyone’s avatar. There’s a reason we don’t do that…
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How a about a color scale solution with up- and downvoting as alternative?
There are lots of topics here with well documented responses as to why Discourse doesn’t include any aggragate score or Karma.
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