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Most people don't follow stuff like this very closely. Does the average person actually know it's functionally identical? I might not if I hadn't read about it
by drumdance 11y ago
Most people don't follow stuff like this very closely. Does the average person actually know it's functionally identical? I might not if I hadn't read about it here, at least not right away. If nothing else I would like something just to see what happens.
- derefr 11y agoMost people don't realize that Liking on Tumblr bookmarks things in a list (a public list, unless you disable it!) either. Or that liking a conversation on Facebook causes you to follow it (people usually think you have to comment; "commenting to follow" is a very common phrase.) Over time, social media platforms have effectively converged on the same basic set of verbs, with each verb doing everything all its parents did. But people still think of the verb as being the same one the platform started with, and limit their use to that use-case. I think it can be smart to switch from a "dialect" verb signifies to a "common loan-word" one, precisely to get people to take notice that the verb really has done more than they thought for a while now.