Favorite (Like) — a positive ranking signal
Predicted probability the viewer likes the post. In 2023 this was famously the LOWEST-weighted positive action (0.5 vs 13.5 for a reply) — likes are cheap.
Last public weight (2023 heavy ranker): 0.5 LEGACY-2023 — from the frozen twitter/the-algorithm; absent from the 2026 code.
2026 weight: withheld (crate::params) — all current weights live in an
unpublished params module. The weights story →
What actually moves it
Likes follow reach; almost everything else on this list is worth more per unit. Do not optimize for likeability alone.
Where it sits in the formula
Phoenix (a Grok-1-architecture transformer, phoenix/README.md)
predicts P(favorite) per viewer from that viewer’s own
engagement history — not from your post’s running like-count. The prediction is
multiplied by its weight and summed with the other 21 terms, then the
author-diversity decay and
out-of-network multiplier apply.
Related: Reply · Repost · Photo expand · Click (open post)