Delete the Favorite Button

You write something good. Actually good, the kind that doesn’t happen often, and you post it on Twitter hoping it reaches people. Then the favorites start rolling in. Nicole stars it. Flo stars it. Sandra stars it. A handful of yellow stars, and then what? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Twitter’s doing this big spring cleaning thing right now—messing with @ replies, changing hashtags, adding photo uploads, maybe renaming the retweet button. Fine, sure. But here’s what I actually want them to do: delete the favorite button.

When you post something on Twitter, you’re asking for real feedback. Either someone replies and starts an actual conversation, or they retweet and your thought keeps spreading. That’s real engagement. That matters.

A favorite, though? A favorite does absolutely nothing. It’s worse than nothing, actually. It gives people an easy escape hatch. A way to say I saw this and I approve without doing anything that would actually mean something. It’s a tired smile, a weak handshake, everything that’s wrong with the social internet pressed into one useless star.

The real problem is that it kills better engagement. Everyone who hits that button is someone who didn’t reply, someone who didn’t retweet, someone who took the path of least resistance. I want to ask every person who’s ever favorited something instead of sharing it: Why not go two clicks left and actually do something?

Sharing means something. Favoriting means you didn’t care enough to try.

So Twitter, if you’re serious about making this place better, about forcing people to actually think and engage instead of taking the easy way out, delete the favorite button. Make people choose: reply, retweet, or move on. No middle ground. No comfort zone. The lonely internet would thank you for it.