The problem is the idea of forcing to choose one or the other. They are each better when they are better. My point all along is I want both and a couple others. If we have only one primary one, the heart is a worse choice.
As I put it in IRC:
- I like heart, but I hate being forced to use it to express any sort of agree / like / support / respect
- heart is more emotional but it’s often enough WRONG to be emotional and wrong to express a heart-type emotion
- when Twitter switched to a heart, there was a real backlash because it truly changes the significance and meaning
I look forward to having that plugin discussed above so that we can use hearts, and we should encourage them whenever appropriate.
When I want to say “I agree” it’s often NOT with a heart, and the heart feels not only wrong often enough but it cheapens the sincerity of the symbol if you have to use it all the time in all these inappropriate ways.
Having a single option of either “like” / “love” etc. that is emotional feels awful. It feels like the system manipulating us into simplistic boxes. The tension is shitty. The option to express such emotions is great, but the value of “respect” or “agree” is that it allows concise communication while still allowing the emotional stuff to be used appropriately and retain its actual emotional meaning.
To reiterate: hearts on Twitter amplify miscommunication, people attack others for “hearting” posts that are seen as bad in some way when the hearting was actually a bookmarking or just an attempt at respect. The heart actually drives the emotional tribalist groupthink. Nobody is willing to give a heart to ideas they don’t like even when they desire to express “respect” in a challenging but respectful debate… This is about having the right tools for the right cases. All the arguments of the right one response are themselves wrong arguments in the first place.
Look at this right here. You’re more likely to want to “respect” what I’m writing. You might “agree”, but if you find something I’m saying troubling, you’ll feel it troubling to “heart” this. If I keep making this text longer and longer, you might still agree but be even less emotionally heartful about my excessive text…