Twitter sleeps with the fishes via Benedikt Koehler on Twitter.

Another day, another article about the Death of Twitter. Not that they’re wrong, it’s just irritating that a lot of the organizations wailing the loudest have been active participants in the slow murder of what was once everyone’s favourite social media platform.

With as many as 23 million robot users, and 14% of tweets auto-generated, we can see that authenticity, the coin of the realm in social discourse, is seriously lacking in the Twitterverse lately. Actual human engagement generates spectacularly greater results, but marketers may wonder if the ROI is there, as humans have things like wages, lunch breaks, and sometimes even lives outside of work.

Today the cries of mourning and rending of garments are particularly noticable, and you can thank Twitter’s worst enemy for that: Twitter.

In deciding to replace the star-shaped Favourite button with a heart-shaped Love (or Like) button, Twitter has inadvertently set off a massive backlash. What may seem like a simple streamlining, bringing its visual vocabulary into line with Instagram, Vine, and other youth-dominated platforms, has instead managed to insult the userbase, which has taken to Medium, The Atlantic, and other grown-up platforms to howl in outrage.

Gizmodo’s Robert McNee’s got their back, though.

(Gizmodo updated their article to reflect that they’d basically stolen the technique uncredited from McNee’s tweets. He contacted us for a fix as well, and here it is)

Assuming you’re not some IE-based Luddite, you can install a plugin to Chrome and/or Firefox that will convert the loathed Heartie to a Beerie or a Zombie or a What-Have-You-ie. Latest version of the hack is always on this page: https://gist.github.com/mcnees/81bf5bbe62611d80d9d0

Step 1: Download the Stylish extension for Chrome or Firefox. (There are a host of other extensions to restyle the web, but Stylish is super easy to use.)

Step 2: Open Stylish and paste this block of code into the main window:

.HeartAnimationContainer {
visibility: hidden;
}
.HeartAnimationContainer:after {
content: ‘🍺’;
visibility: visible;
display: block;
position: absolute;
}

Step 3: Replace the beer emoji with the emoji or character of your choice, although the beer emoji is a good choice. You should also make sure the one line of code beneath “.HeartAnimationContainer {” and the four lines beneath “.HeartAnimationContainer:after {”are indented four spaces.

Step 4: Add “twitter.com” to the “Applies to:” field below the code. Click Save.

You can do this! It’s a simple copy-paste job and as I always say in tech support, you don’t have to understand the code to run it.

Got it? Congratulations, you’re a skiddie!

Make no mistake, this is hacking of the lowest order; like changing out the floor mats in your new car (never pay for factory floor mats, dude!). But it nonetheless configures the digital world to suit the individual user better; as Sherry Turkle put it in The Second Self, computers form a kind of self-portrait, and the more reconfigured, the better the portrait.

Me, I don’t do hearts. I’m thinking Cthulhu ^^(;,,,;)^^.

You?

Categories: Breaking, Communication, Hack of the Day, Hackers, Humor, Identity, News, Social Media, Twitter