Just when everyone thought Elon Musk would finally leave X (formerly known as Twitter) as is, the tech billionaire has another change up his sleeve that will pull the platform away from its roots. The upcoming modification was for the site to look "cleaner," according to the X owner.
Upcoming Changes to X
When users open X, they look at the engagements of posts to see which topics are currently hot, and that's usually determined by the number of likes, retweets, and quotes a post has. Soon enough, that will be going away.
Elon Musk, the owner of the social media site, believes that removing them would result in a "cleaner" timeline, stating that he had been "dying to do this for a year." The change was first announced by DogeDesigner on X.
The metrics would not be immediately visible to X users, and they would have to tap on the posy first to see the like and retweet counts. Musk confirmed the change through the replies. "That is definitely happening. Just view count, as proxy for the other metrics, will show on the timeline."
The only metric for engagement that will be visible to users will be the view count, and it will be moved to the upper right corner of the post next to the time stamp, as reported by Gizmodo. Furthermore, users will have to swipe to engage with the post.
Swiping right would right will allow you to reply and swiping left will "favorite" the post. Users on the platform are already disagreeing with the upcoming redesign, saying that they already like and are used to the layout now.
User @Brick_Suit said that he did not want a cleaner timeline. "I want to be able to look at my timeline and know where the action is. Which posts are people liking? Which posts are getting replies?" he added.
Another user who goes by @nicksortor replied that with all due respect, it was a horrible idea, pointing out that users will not be able to ratio other users, which is where a disagreeing statement gets more likes than the original post.
@Liberacrat_ even put up a poll with choices between "Good idea!" "Horrible idea!" and "Try- but revert if fail." 79.3% thought it was a horrible idea, 8.2% thought it was a good idea, and 12.5% believed that it was okay to try but should revert if it failed.
It's the News Headlines All Over Again
In case you forgot, Musk also had the news headlines removed from posts, so when people post links, users will only be able to see an image with the link attached. The tech billionaire had the same reasoning behind the shift, saying that it would make the timeline look better.
The change was implemented back in October 2023 but has already been reverted back to how it was. The headlines are now appearing at the bottom of the image again. Hopefully, this will be the same case for metrics in the engagement system.
