The 'Retweet' button is Twitter's version of the Like Button, and it is for this reason they have disabled the ability to edit the tweet so as to mimic the 'single-click' behavior of Like buttons.
Ask HN: Why is there no 'like' button on Twitter?
41–50 of 58 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no 'like' button on Twitter?
#42Retweeting, even though does not mean the same thing, in practice works pretty close to "like" in twitter ecosystem.
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no 'like' button on Twitter?
#43The twitter analogue is the "re-tweet" which IMHO is pretty obnoxious; your stream gets clogged with your friends RT'ing things about people you've a) never heard of and b) if you had and you cared, you'd just follow them yourself. Twitter at scale is a one-way "write only" medium.
The RTs I see are often very insightful and tell me which people I should be following. Also, RT are probably more insightful on average because at least two people found it worth saying.
Now what has been bothering me are unfunny "OH"s, which don't even mention an author...
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no 'like' button on Twitter?
#44I don't want the feature.
Twitter and Facebook are different things. Facebook is for sharing things that are important to me as a person, whereas Twitter is about consuming and sharing information that is important to me as a professional.
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no 'like' button on Twitter?
#45The twitter analogue is the "re-tweet" which IMHO is pretty obnoxious; your stream gets clogged with your friends RT'ing things about people you've a) never heard of and b) if you had and you cared, you'd just follow them yourself. Twitter at scale is a one-way "write only" medium.
re-tweet is even more obnoxious if you're searching a hashtag - the same thing shows up multiple times.
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no 'like' button on Twitter?
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Facebook Status and the Twitter status are fundamentally the same thing. You are telling the world what is on your mind. The like functionality in Facebook is a means of communication - someone clicks like and says I like your opinion on this, your good news, your joke, the fact you are in a good mood. Now if Twitter has the same status functionality could 'like' not be equally effective?
From a technical point of view they are the same thing, both are short 'status' updates. However they are used in different ways, by different users for different things. People mostly use twitter as a 'microblog'. It's like a blog, but each 'blog post' is limited to be very small. People use Facebook status updates to tell people what they are doing and to tell their friends things. If I see your facebook updates, y…
I don't really agree with you as many of my friends feed their twitter to facebook - I assume there is some kind of app for this. Thus many facebook status updates are actually tweets. So many of the end users see tweets and status updates as the same thing. Facebook just needs to come up with a snappy verb for it.
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no 'like' button on Twitter?
#47A lot of people treat the favourite button (star) as "like". Unfortunately neither Twitter's web interface nor its API expose this data in a very useful way, so it only really has an effect if the like-ee is using a sufficiently thick native client or a third-party site like http://favstar.fm/ to keep track of who's faved their tweets.
Actually, favorites on twitter have their own API stream now. Sites like favstar now update in near real-time and you can get instant "fav" notifications from iPhone notification apps like Boxcar.
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no 'like' button on Twitter?
#48While the retweet button is similar to like (my co-founder and I actually discussed this the day before), I do think that a Twitter Like button may come along eventually. In fact, I think it's even possible for an upstart Twitter client to decide (on its own or with some of the other clients) to implement a Like button protocol, in the hopes that Twitter would eventually adopt it.
Like buttons are great for monetization, so I think it could make sense for Twitter.
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no 'like' button on Twitter?
#49Even HN has "like"! Well, it's an up-arrow, but it still servers the same point: to allow you to support a comment without requiring a low-signal comment to do so. OTOH, twitter isn't exactly high-signal in the first place.
I would counter (this is not my original idea but I highly subscribe to it) that HN's up-arrow serves a dual-purpose...'liking' an article and 'bookmarking' it for later. There's no other way I can see to explain how articles get 40+ votes on the homepage but only have 5-10 comments on them. If PG would simply add a 'read it later' style link/button to stories, up-arrows would retain their 'like this' purpose and I believe the homepage would have 'better' content on it.
I'm guilty of this myself.... I very often will click an up-arrow if I'm viewing the feed and don't have time to open up an individual article so i can use my instapaper bookmarklet on it.
Re: Ask HN: Why is there no 'like' button on Twitter?
#50The fav feature is the like button. You can see your most popular tweets at http://favstar.fm/users/;
From there click on the recent button to see what tweets of yours were recently faved, or the given button to see what you have faved.
I've recently started integrating RT tracking too, as tech tweeters do tend to use RT more than likes.
If you log into http://favstar.fm once, it will start collecting favs and RTs you give and receive almost instantly. Otherwise it collects them more slowly using twitter's REST api.