Twitter is Thinking About Getting Rid of the Like Button

Twitter has been making a lot of changes recently. Some good, like when they finally gave us back a reverse chronological timeline. Others not so good, such as their possible plan to remove the ‘Likes’ feature from the site entirely.

Their reason for this? It’s apparently to “improve debate on the platform” according to Twitter CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey. To back this up, the Twitter Communications account (@TwitterComms) tweeted “… we are rethinking everything about the service to ensure we are incentivizing healthy conversation …”

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. https://t.co/k5uPe5j4CW

— Twitter Comms (@TwitterComms) October 29, 2018

But is everyone’s favorite heart-shaped button really the problem? There is a lot of bad that goes on in Twitter’s little corner of the internet. Harassment, hate speech, spreading of lies. None of that is “Healthy conversation” and none of that is at all related to the like button. Instead of doing away with the feature, it might be more productive for Twitter to focus on the users spreading hate.

Apparently, there are some psychologists who have reported a certain social media addiction that has popped up. People crave endorsement from their peers and will delete their posts if they don’t get enough likes or comments. But that is nothing new. And if that’s the reason for their decision, then they’ll have to remove comments and retweets as well. And by that point, just delete the whole website.

Twitter hasn’t made any concrete plans yet. Everything is still “in the works”. Hopefully, while they’re working on it, they come up with a better idea. We’ll have to wait and see.

In the meantime, please head over to @EDMTunes on Twitter, and like and retweet everything we post. We would really appreciate it.