Elon Musk, owner of the X social network, has pledged to hide the number of reposts, likes, and responses to posts in the platform’s main feed. He believes that simplifying the platform’s interface will strengthen its aesthetic appeal.
Musk has repeatedly expressed his desire to eliminate all post control buttons from the main feed, along with likes and repost counts, leaving behind only the view counter. This proposal came after the implementation of another significant design change, where X stopped publicly displaying headlines of posts with links to news articles, instead, replacing them with clickable images.
This approach caused criticism from both users and media representatives. However, Musk justified these transformations with a drive to enhance the platform’s aesthetic allure, asserting the previous design version caused him discomfort. Nevertheless, several months later, X partially reinstated titles, now showing them atop the main image.
Abandoning the display of such metrics as the number of likes and reposts is expected to encourage users towards more constructive communication. It also aims to decrease the level of negativity on the platform. Despite the potential advantages of these changes, they also raise questions about how the new communication dynamics in X will be formed without clear indicators of post popularity.
