【The Ages of Lulu (1990)】

Twitter is The Ages of Lulu (1990)about to remove the red, heart-shaped 'like' function from its platform, reports suggest.

According to the Telegraph, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey said at a Twitter event last week that he would get rid of the like function "soon." Per the Telegraph, Dorsey said he "was not a fan of the heart-shaped button."

In March 2018, Twitter introduced a bookmarking function, which allows users to privately save tweets without hitting the like button – which not only implies a positive attitude towards the content of the tweet, but is also public.

The Twitter communications team addressed the future of the 'like' button in a tweet, saying that they were "rethinking everything about the service," and that "that includes the like button."

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Twitter's potential removal of the like button forms part of an effort to create a healthier climate of debate on the platform, the Telegraphreports.

Dorsey hinted at his dissatisfaction with the like function earlier this month when he spoke at the WIRED25 summit.

"We have a big like button with a heart on it and we’re incentivizing people to want it to go up," Dorsey said. "Is that the right thing? Versus contributing to the public conversation or a healthy conversation? How do we incentivise healthy conversation?"

On the platform in question, people were pretty surprised by Dorsey's attitude to the 'like' button.

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Many users pointed out that Twitter has much deeper challenges and that changing basic functionality was the wrong place to start improving the platform:

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Others will believe it when they see it:

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The like button was added to Twitter in 2015 as replacement for the previous favourite button, which was star-shaped.

UPDATE: Oct. 29, 2018, 2:45 p.m. GMT Statement from Twitter.