Elon Musk’s X, formerly known as Twitter, is once again planning a controversial design change to the platform.
X is currently testing the removal of like, comment, and repost buttons, along with their counts, from replies to posts. The view count would be removed from reply posts as well.
This change to X has not yet been released, but was discovered in code of the most recent X app, X for iOS v10.53, by X user @aaronp613. New features and platform changes discovered this way don’t always go live and sometimes remain unreleased. However, this does shows that the company is seriously considering the move and officially testing out the removal of these buttons and counts.
The removal of these features would only affect how replies look while viewing the original post. If a user clicked on a reply, the post page for that reply would reveal the like, comment, and report buttons and views.
Unpopular changes to X
Removing interaction counts from replies would undoubtedly change the culture of X by affecting the social media meme known as the “ratio.” When a user publishes a controversial or unpopular post on X, the reply posts from users who comment in the replies often receive more reposts and likes than the original post. This is known as a “ratio.”
Musk is no stranger to making major cultural changes to X. Of course, the most obvious example is the complete rebranding of Twitter to X and the removal of the vernacular “tweet” to refer to posts.
Most recently, Musk’s X made all users’ likes private, a move that the company admitted was made in order to protect users who like controversial posts.
However, there have also been instances where X has backtracked on unpopular changes. Last year, X removed link headlines from posts because Musk did not like the way it looked. The contextless link previews caused trouble on the platform and X soon-after reverted back to displaying headlines.
Last month, another similar X test was discovered in the code of the X for iOS app that removed like, comment, and reply buttons from the main original post when viewed in the feed. This change required that users swipe left or right to interact with a post. As of publishing, X has yet to make this feature live.
