Twitter is considering introducing Facebook-like “heart” and “face” emoji reactions

If you remember the turmoil when Twitter changed the star mark (“favorite”) to the heart mark (“like”), how strongly Twitter users feel about how they interact with tweets. You know. Currently, Twitter is considering changes that are likely to be a big hit again. In March 2021, the company conducted a survey of users asking what they thought about increasing the reaction of emoji as seen on Facebook.

A Twitter spokeswoman said of the survey, “We are looking for new ways for people to express themselves in conversations on Twitter.” There is.

A Twitter survey suggests several types of reactions, including a heart (“like”), a tearful laughing face (“interesting”), a thinking face (“interesting”), and a crying face (“sad”). It’s a pictogram.

In addition to this basic set, we propose a variation that expresses the feeling of “wow” with flames instead of a face with wide open eyes and mouth, and “supports” with hurray hands instead of hugging faces. I’m asking the user which one they prefer.

More controversial are the common ways of expressing the feelings of “like” and “dislike” for a user’s tweets, such as thumbs up or down, a green or red “100”, or a green one. They are considering ways to indicate “agree” and “disagree” by indicating with an upward arrow or a red downward arrow. This is reminiscent of Reddit’s “voting for” and “voting against” mechanics.

Questions from this survey show that Twitter is aware of the difficulty of introducing emoji reactions that mean negative emotions. The company asks users how they want to take advantage of reactions that show feelings of opposition and disgust. For example, do you use this reaction instead of replying to a tweet, or do you use it for irrelevant or offensive tweets?

In addition, Twitter asks users if their tweets are disliked or disliked, so they should refrain from future tweets or take them as “constructive” feedback on their posts.

Twitter is overly aware that the introduction of a set of reactions can have a significant impact on how people interact with Twitter content, and potentially people have “opposite” reactions to their tweets. I clearly understand that Twitter usage can be chilled if you start to care.

However, the mechanism of expressing “agreement” and “disagreement”, whether it is a thumb or an arrow, is a common way of engaging with content in other places on the Web. It is used not only on forum sites like Reddit, but also on YouTube, Imgur, Pandora and many other sites. On the other hand, the thumbs-up signal that says “Like!” Has become more popular under the leadership of Facebook. But now it’s used in the form of arrows and hearts, or it’s just a click-and-click box, as in Amazon user reviews that rate it as “helpful.”

Since Facebook introduced the set of emoji reactions in 2015, the use of extended emoji reactions that can express multiple emotions as well as just “likes” has become commonplace. Other social media such as LinkedIn have followed suit, and by 2020 even Twitter has adopted a set of emoji reactions for DM (direct messages).

And in this survey, Twitter is asking users about how to display emoji reactions, such as whether to display the number of negative reactions.

Twitter told TechCrunch that the work they’re doing in the area of ​​reaction is exploratory, and what we’re currently doing is looking at ways to add more nuance to the conversations people are having. That’s because he thinks it will help readers better understand the additional context of the conversation. The company also emphasized that the reaction of the new emoji is not a replacement for the “heart”, but an addition.

Twitter hasn’t built a set of emoji reactions yet and hasn’t tested it, but it looks like it’s heading in that direction.

Recently, when a user asked me to try not only hearts but also emoji reactions, Twitter’s chief design officer, Dantley Davis, said, “I think we’ll have something ready soon. I will. ”

We’ll have something for you soon.

— Dantley Davis (@dantley) March 19, 2021

Twitter, like LinkedIn and Facebook, is starting to think that it should offer some reaction emojis, not just hearts. You don’t have to cover everything, but it would be nice to have 5 or 6 options.

Respond to this tweet with an emoji and test it.

Arlan

I think we can prepare something soon.