Elon Musk’s X announces plans to eliminate likes and reposts from timelines. Discover the implications of this social media shift and how it might impact user engagement and content visibility.
The engineer working for X disclosed that this platform will be removing likes and repost features from the timeline in a couple of weeks. This step will decrease the number of posts made just for likes. CryptoX can understand this issue.
“I’m not working on this change myself, but employees are still dogfooding it. It should be gradually rolled out to users in the next few weeks, and the UX may change by then,” said X software engineer Ellis Driscollin in his post on April 29.
The engineer Driscol comments after watching a demonstration video of new users’ experiences, which has not yet been released. In this video, there is a menu named “exploding menu.”. In the new feature, the platform stores likes and reposts separately. Christopher Stanlye, who leads payments on X, shared this video for the first time.
Driscol pointed out that the video shared by Stanlye is just a demo of the menu and does not show a user’s experience. He explained that the primary function of the user’s experience will involve easy-to-use gestures.
“Liking should be equally fast. Replying should be faster,” he added.
The users of X are still able to see the likes and reposts, on all the posts, but after the update, they need to check each post separately to see their matrix.
Comparing this change with Instagram, which hides its number of likes and replaces it with hearts, this change addresses worries about mental health.
The youngsters take it like a competition to get more likes on their posts and can get affected by this competition. This change decreases the focus on competition.
X has not given any solid reason, like Instagram, behind all these changes; however, Stanely stated in some of his comments that these changes address increasing users’ experiences and fitting more data on the screen.
Many users on X suggested that this update will help users focus on the post, and reduce the number of posts made for similar purposes only.
Some of the users criticize it by stating that this new update might allow this platform to promote content favored by themselves, without their knowledge of why the post is popular. They compare it to the working mechanisms of TikTok and Instagram.
