Twitter loves the heart, unfaves the star

Nov 4, 2015 12:15 GMT  ·  By

Yesterday, Jack Dorsey's new Twitter replaced its famous "star" button, used to add tweets to a favorites list, with a "heart" icon meant to symbolize likes.

This change also affected Vine and was inspired by the company's Periscope service, where hearts have been used to "like" content since its launch, back in March this year.

Besides replacing the heart icon, a change was also made to the tweet and profile pages, Twitter now showing "Likes" where it once was saying "Favorites."

The changes took effect on twitter.com, the Twitter Windows 10, iOS and Android apps, and in tweets embedded across the Internet. Changes for Vine were only made to the main website and the Android app. The Vine heart will arrive on the iOS and Mac apps in the coming days.

If you don't like the heart...

Even if the changes were trivial in nature, the site's users didn't generally react very positively, feeling a part of Twitter's originality was being taken away by using the term "like," which became famous on Facebook.

The good news is that, for those who don't like the current heart icon, some clever user found a simple way to replace it with the old star, or any other icon or emoji they'd like.

It relies on installing the Stylish extension for Chrome or Firefox, and then adding a few lines of CSS code that get executed when accessing Twitter. The code is:

code
.HeartAnimationContainer {
       visibility: hidden;
}

.HeartAnimationContainer:after {
       content: “INSERT YOUR EMOJI IN HERE”;
       visibility: visible;
       display: block;
       position: absolute;
}
Paste this code inside a new Stylish style file, give it a name, and add "twitter.com" to the domain field. Hit save and go on Twitter. You should see your custom icon take effect right away. If you're more apt with CSS, you can even replace Likes with Favorites.