Twitter: change the culture, change the platform

Emily Bell on the consequences of replacing Twitter’s stars – “favourites” – with hearts – “likes”:

I found myself not bookmarking, as I would have done a day earlier, a horrifying image retweeted by journalists depicting men using phones to film a woman being stoned to death for adultery. I did not “like” let alone “love” the image but wanted to note it as important. We must have a system which allows for capturing the significant as well as the appealing.

Now, this might be, as Martin Belam has suggested of other criticisms, a power-user problem. But equally, Emily is quite right in identifying this as a cultural shift in the platform, and changing the culture of a social space, changes that space.