By Pascal Oparada
If reports by the Telegraph newspaper is anything to go by, the future of the heart-shaped “Like” button is in jeopardy.
Twitter said it is an effort to improve debate on the platform.
According to the newspaper, Twitter founder, Jack Dorsey said at a Twitter event last week that he would get rid of the button in order improve debate on the platform. He said he is not a fan of the heart-shaped button.
In March, Twitter introduced the “Bookmark” function which allows users to privately save a tweet without hitting the Like button which analysts believe is a positive attitude towards a tweet or a content.
According to Twitter, it is giving incentives to the public to allow it get ride of the button.
The Twitter communications team addressed the future of the ‘like’ button in a tweet, saying that they were “rethinking everything about the service,” and that “that includes the like button.”
“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,” they said.
But users are not happy about Jack Dorsey’s decision with many saying it would be a weird thing to do.
They pointed out that Twitter has much deeper challenges and that changing basic functionality was the wrong place to start improving the platform.
The like button was added to Twitter in 2015 as replacement for the previous ‘favourite’ button, which was star-shaped.