How Do I Get Stars Back On Twitter? Don't Worry, Heart-Haters, There's A Will And There's A Way

Never would anyone imagine that a symbol expressing love and devotion would inspire so much hate. But that's exactly what happened on Tuesday when Twitter replaced stars with hearts, leading many users to explode in 140-character fury. Why? Well, that depends who you are — some dislike the heart because it adds emotion to a function that used to be neutral, and some dislike the heart because they just really don't like hearts. But there's good news for those who don't heart hearts! You can use a Chrome extension to bring back Twitter's stars.

Yep, just hours after Twitter changed the symbol (Akarshan Kumar, Twitter's product manager said the star proved to be confusing for new readers), Fav Forever was born. The extension will restore the stars on your profile, but, as Mashable notes, it will not "change how tweets appear outside of Twitter.com, and user profile pages still say 'likes,' rather than favorites."

Still, not a bad deal for those of you who just can't let go and latch onto the increasingly used heart symbol on social media. Like Fav Forever itself, which wrote on its description, "On November 3, 2015, the lives of millions of Twitter users were forever changed. Where yesterday there were stars, today there are hearts. Fav Forever brings the stars back."

And the change could actually mark a big deal for the company and its users. As Huffington Post wrote Tuesday, Twitter's history of abuse (ahem, #GamerGate) could make the heart problematic:

Many of those power users, particularly women and minorities, knew for years that Twitter has had an abuse problem, and yet it was only until celebrities started fleeing the platform that the company's management did something real about it. Targets of abuse might not Like the Heart, either.

And it forces users to endorse a statement, or an article, instead of just flagging it for later use or reading, something which has proven to anger users — and, as Huffington Post notes, journalists who use the star to curate. And that's something the inward-facing Fav Forever won't be able to change. 

But if the Internet has proven anything, it's that we can adapt. And that we can find the humor in everything, no matter how we feel. 

Image: Bethany Clarke/Getty; Giphy