What we talk about when we talk about faves
The fave tab has made us better stalkers…Is that ok?
A Katie Zhu // Alana Levinson joint
It’s a watershed moment in any relationship: When you like someone enough to digitally stalk them.
You’ll peep their Facebook or Instagram feeds, but any social media savvy creep knows the most revealing digital behavior of all is your love interest’s fave tab— or like tab, whatever — on Twitter. (Why is he faving that girl’s selfie? She’s cute, I guess. Or who’s this girl whose tweets he’s faved like 5 of in a row? 👀 I see you.) If you don’t know what your significant other is faving on the internet… do you even really know them at all??
Throwing out a fave is so simple, yet versatile. It can mean a variety of things — simply acknowledging an at-mention, expressing appreciation for something you found funny, relatable, or that resonated in some personal way. But the fave tab is a portal into who we are. “Liking” or “faving” is one of the most complex social tools in that it can mean so many different things depending on context. A fave can mean “I love you,” “I hate you,” “I see you,” “You’re a hoot,” “Let’s get married,” “Suck it.”
In short, trying to extrapolate meaning from a fave is a total mind-fuck.
And meanwhile, Twitter’s trying to change the cultural norms and mores around faves — most blatantly by ditching the star all together in favor of hearts. Hearts, really?
“We want to make Twitter easier and more rewarding to use, and we know that at times the star could be confusing, especially to newcomers. You might like a lot of things, but not everything can be your favorite.”
“The heart, in contrast, is a universal symbol that resonates across languages, cultures, and time zones. The heart is more expressive, enabling you to convey a range of emotions and easily connect with people.”
“The heart is more expressive, enabling you to convey a range of emotions,” Twitter rationalized in their blog post. Okay, so the goal is not actually to restrict the meaning of this interaction. But a heart comes with its own baggage, too:
Twitter can call this what it wants — a like, fave, star, heart. And sure, there’s some ~DATA~ that shows more people are engaging with the heart. But the feature and functionality remain the same. And there’s entrenched user behavior around this feedback mechanism on Twitter, so we’re going to refer to them as “faves” for the duration of this transmission.
Thus, the fave stalk is about trying to glean insights into an individual’s personality: what resonates with them, what they’re into. It’s about trying to understand in the most basic form who a person is by analyzing their behavior and footprints across the internet.
That brings us to the fave tab, a beast in a class of its own. There’s nothing else on the internet that is simultaneously as deeply personal yet public as the fave tab. Why does this public display of favoring exist if not for anxious lovers? And why has it been there since the beginning?
Twitter says:
Favorites, represented by a small star icon in a Tweet, are most commonly used when users like a Tweet. Favoriting a Tweet can let the original poster know that you liked their Tweet, or you can save the Tweet for later.
Sure, we can buy the argument that you’d want to comb through your own faves to see what you “saved for later,” as Twitter suggests. Twitter sees faves as a way to enable curation, saving something to come back to later. And maybe they felt the fave tab could give people a way to vet someone’s tastes before you followed them. Some people even use the fave tab as a way to browse Twitter.
But the fave is passive. It feels like an act that’s just meant for you and the tweeter. It’s not broadcast-y, like a retweet, so it feels safe. But put into the context of real relationships, suddenly, the fave becomes much more voyeuristic, less innocent. Collating all of these nuanced faves under a top-level public tab on your profile feels like turning the lights on in the middle of the night. Anyone passing by your has an unencumbered line of sight in.
Where is the line between public broadcast and more intimate interactions in a social product like Twitter? We’ve also seen the social media platform experimenting more and more with recommendations, incorporating favorites as a signal to surface other content for you. They’re trying to change the cultural norms and mores around faves — most blatantly by ditching the star all together in favor of hearts. Hearts, really? We’ll get there.
When thinking about product interactions we need to consider both the experiences of creating the interaction and consuming it. That is, the interaction itself and the representation of it throughout the system. You can’t think about these in isolation if you want to design a complete experience.
Because the mechanics, nature and use of the interaction will differ greatly depending on the context in which it’s surfaced and displayed, if at all. The fave tab feels like something that was just tacked on, with no thought beyond: “People can fave things so let’s just slap them all on people’s profile that will be useful right? It’ll be like, social or something.”
The use case for this product feature is to enable stalking. The internet makes that shit so easy now. Anyone who tells you they haven’t stalked anyone — Googled a name, looked up someone’s Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Match.com profile… is lying. The fave tab supports zero other use cases other than for crushes or significant others to stalk their love interests or partners, respectively. Or provide a sneakier way for you to get to know your colleagues, boss, any person of fleeting interest.
If we consider a spectrum of publicness to privateness of social products, Twitter is over on the far end of the “hey, look at me and literally everything that I’m doing on this service! follow me pls?” Robinson Meyer over at The Atlantic writes eloquently about the “public and private smoosh” and other collapsing of contexts (personal vs. professional, subjective vs. objective) as part of the decay of Twitter. At the end of the piece, he dives into the matter of visibility, interviewing researcher Bonnie Stewart, who studies academic Twitter:
[Twitter] is a space where all contexts are collapsed and all ideas can be mob-amplified or end up pulled for a Buzzfeed article. And I’ve adjusted accordingly and I am careful about what I say and some of that is good because frankly the world does not need to hear me pronounce on every single thing I don’t know much about. Twitter’s affordances still render it powerful — but that very power and capacity to curry visibility, both within its own space and within broader media spaces, also render it challenging.
She’s talking about the visibility of tweets themselves, but a similar argument follows for the interactions we take on the platform as well. Meyer continues:
At some point early last year, the standard knock against Twitter — which had long ceased to be “I don’t want to know what someone’s eating for lunch” — became “I don’t want everyone to see what I have to say.”
Yes. There’s been a backlash against publicness — broadcast has become off-putting. We’ve seen a dramatic rise in the popularity of ephemeral messaging apps like Snapchat, which don’t have any traditional social discovery affordances, and closed products like Slack and WeChat, where you’re writing to a known group of people. Instagram is technically open, but feels closed and secure. Only recently have people caught on to the more public aspects. But Twitter? Tweets are all surface area.
When thinking about the fave tab product, what job is this helping the user accomplish? What value are we creating for users who get to browse, analyze, pour over and obsess about other people’s faves? The heart was an attempt to make Twitter “easier and more rewarding to use” and less confusing for new users. But that doesn’t solve the real problem here. Digital stalking has become so easy — a default behavior, a reflex for most — that to not purposefully design for this use case is a huge oversight.
As we continue to build and iterate on tech products that define who we are, let’s consider more deeply the psychology of the features we’re building. When designing these social and communication platforms and creating the feedback mechanisms, creators should be purposeful about what we’re exposing and why. The idea of getting to know someone through online stalking of digital footprints and behavior is commonplace, and if we’re tacking on windows to a user’s proverbial internet house, we should at least provide some blinds or shades.
