Key Takeaways:
X, formerly known as Twitter, is preparing for yet another drastic change. According to the company’s director of engineering Haofei Wang, the social media platform is planning to remove public likes from users’ profiles.
This means X users will no longer be able to browse what posts other platform users have liked.
X Users Can Soon “Like” Content Without Worrying Who Might See It
MacRumors analyst Aaron Perris was among the first to report the change when he discovered the setting on the updated X app for iOS, which completely removed the “Likes” tab from every user’s public profile when turned on.
As users speculated what the hiding of the like count could mean, Wang reiterated that public likes “are incentivizing the wrong behavior”. He gave an example of people feeling discouraged from liking content that might be “edgy”, fearing retaliation from trolls, to protect their public image.
Wang noted that soon users will be able to like content without worrying who might see it while adding that the more posts a user likes, the better X’s ‘For You’ algorithm will get at recommending personalized content.
“Yeah, we are making likes private”, wrote Haofei Wang in his X post from Thursday.
X first made the feature available to Premium users back in September after some high-profile individuals were ridiculed for appearing to like controversial posts on the platform. Wang’s comments suggest that the feature could soon be available as a default option for all X users.
In 2017, Texas Senator Ted Cruz found himself in hot waters after an alleged staffer “liked” a pornographic video using his Twitter profile, while celebrities like Harry Styles and Samuel L Jackson went viral for liking NSFW posts.
How Does the New Like Feature Work on X?
Enrique Barragan, a senior software engineer at X clarified any doubts users had about what was happening to likes on the social media platform. In an X post, Barragan pointed out that once all likes on X go private, users will still be able to see who liked their own posts, with the like count on their posts and replies still remaining public for all users.
The real change is that from now on, users won’t be able to see who liked other users’ posts, and there will no longer be a tab on the users’ profile showcasing all the posts they have ever liked on X.
X owner Elon Musk had mentioned in a conference held in March that the platform could remove likes and reposts from public posts so that users would only be able to see the number of times a post has been viewed.
The feature has attracted its fair share of critics, including Twitter’s co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey, who wrote in a post that it would make liking a post indistinguishable from bookmarking it.
Musk himself has received constant backlash for liking the so-called “edgy” posts on X. Since the time he bought the company for $48 billion in 2022, the billionaire founder of Tesla has rolled out several changes to X that often ended with him backtracking and re-implementing features that previously existed.
However, this latest change is being discussed by the platform’s engineering team, making it seem to be a permanent update. A code was also discovered showing X is ready to launch the feature.
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