noun, gerund — from to heart coined here
HART·ing
The automated performance of affection at scale: a bot tapping hearts across profiles to widen the surface on which a match might land. Not liking anyone — increasing the area on which liking can be reciprocated.
The account was hearting all night, and by morning the matches were somebody's problem to answer.
Etymologyheart, the verb — not the organ but the icon. English verbed the symbol around I ♥ NY, and the dictionaries let it in around 2011; platforms then narrowed it to the tap. This sense adds the fourth remove: organ to symbol, symbol to tap, tap to automation of the tap. Each step keeps the signal and sheds the feeling.
NoteThis lexicon's oldest rule is that -ing nominals keep their agent and -ation nominals delete it: informing has an informer, information has none; nobody wagewarifies. hearting is the first entry to break the rule from inside. The -ing form keeps the agent slot, exactly as the grammar promises — and the slot is filled by software. Someone is doing the hearting; the someone is a script. The form retains the agent and the practice hollows it, which is a subtler deletion than -ification ever managed: planification hides the planner, hearting shows you the lover and there is nobody home. The register of the definition is load-bearing. Match surface is area talk — affection measured in geometry, a bid spread wide rather than aimed. The word had already shed the feeling three times on the way here; the strategy just completes the process at industrial scale.
Where this string was already doing work before it was put to this use. The sense below is the coinage; the spelling is not.
To love or like; verbed from the ♥ icon, popularised by I ♥ NY, added to the OED in 2011. On platforms, narrowed to tapping the heart: hearted your message, hearted the post. The gerund follows trivially.