It may be because I'm still getting used to this, but the Add to Favorites icon looks small enough for me that it took me a while to realize it's an actual button and not just, well, decorative.

So, I guess making the icon larger, the whole area of the favorites text + icon clickable, changing its appearance when you hover the mouse on it and maybe even replace the text from favorites to add to favorites could be enough improvements to make this functionality more obvious and encouraging to use.

Either way, and again, just throwing that out there.

this is a different thing to what u are saying, but i realized adding an entry to my favs is freezing the page for a few seconds. if theres a simple way to optimize this, it wld be very cool

Come to think of it, the Add to Favorites button from the Recent Submissions player is most of the improvements I described. So, duplicating that one for when we listen to entries in the player individually and using a larger version for the arena Entry pages would suffice, I think.