Twitter is asking random users if they’d be down with Facebook-like emoji reactions

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It’s been five years since Twitter axed the star reaction for ‘like’ in favor of a heart for ‘favorite’, and now they’re working on another big change. The company has been surveying random users to find out how they felt about a move to Facebook-style reactions, with a larger range of emoji-style reactions to choose from.

A spokesperson for Twitter told TechCrunch that “We’re exploring additional ways for people to express themselves in conversations happening on Twitter.” Apparently, that means of expression include the fire emoji, which will probably get misused. Other proposed emoji reactions are the laughing face with tears for funny, the thinking face for interesting, and the crying face for sad.

After the initial, and fairly-predictable set of reactions were offered, the survey suggested more interesting ones, with “awesome” represented by either the shocked face or the fire emoji, or the hug or raised hands emojis for “support”. Oh, and because Twitter loves its controversy, it’s also considering ways for users to signal dislike for posts, with thumbs-down, or the arrow-down emojis in red. Regular Twitter users know that “being ratioed” is usually the way users show their dislike for a tweet, so maybe we don’t need to be able to downvote.

That said, Twitter does know that adding downvote options could backfire mightily, as one question asks how the user would feel if one of their tweets got downvote/dislike reactions. Maybe if enough survey respondents say that they’d be less likely to use the site after receiving negative reactions, Twitter won’t implement them.

Have any thoughts on this? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

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Joe Rice-Jones

Maker, meme-r, and unabashed geek with nearly half a decade of blogging experience at KnowTechie, SlashGear and XDA Developers. If it runs on electricity (or even if it doesn't), Joe probably has one around his office somewhere, with particular focus in gadgetry and handheld gaming. Shoot him an email at joe@knowtechie.com.