Today, remembering what Twitter was like before Elon Musk took control is an exercise in nostalgia similar to recalling when we used to watch Dragon Ball every morning before our parents took us to school (rest in peace, master Toriyama). The social network has changed a lot, for the worse, and those of us who are “getting gray hair” are fed up. A lot. Too much.
But the worst part of it all is that Musk wants to annoy us even more, because that’s how he is. The billionaire tweeted on Wednesday announcing that comment counters, “likes”, “retweets”, and “saves” will disappear from the feeds in a redesign that is currently in development. His reason? Supposedly, he wants the feed to be “cleaner” (I guess the constant “ratios” that users give him when he posts one of his ideas have nothing to do with it).
According to Musk’s announcement in response to another user, to view these metrics we will have to click on the tweet, as they will be hidden in all Twitter feeds, whether it’s For you, Following, or the Communities we have joined. In addition, gesture actions similar to those in messaging apps like WhatsApp would be added, allowing us to reply to a tweet by swiping right and like it by swiping left.
As many of you may suppose, this announcement has not been liked by the Twitter community, being only well received among the cryptobros, bot accounts, digital snake oil salesmen, and the rest of Musk’s fans.
By removing these metrics and leaving only the view counter (another one of his infamous changes), engagement could drastically decrease due to the psychological factor of interacting with posts that have interactions (the more interactions a post shows, the more likely you are to interact with it). Something that could be very displeasing to advertisers, already quite unhappy with Musk and his new CEO.
This change would be a continuation of another one that also didn’t please the community at all (to no one’s surprise): the hiding of the retweet and like count on tweets. While before we could easily see who had liked and retweeted our tweets by simply clicking on the counter, for some time now we have to click on the button with three dots and select “View post interactions” to see them, making the process much more difficult.
