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X will soon get rid of the likes from post and the Likes tab as well.
Elon Musk has made a host of changes since rebranding Twitter to X but even then, removing Likes from the platform feels like the end.
Your good old likes from social media app X are going away soon. Well, technically, they are not going away but Elon Musk has decided to hide the feature from your profile. In fact, you will also lose the Likes tab from the account in the near future.
The rumours of the like tab going away come after a recent report, and now X engineers have confirmed the development. Likes have been a critical part of Twitter earlier and other social media apps like Instagram even Facebook over the years.
So, why is X going to remove the feature and also the Likes tab from our profile? “Public likes are incentivizing the wrong behavior. For example, many people feel discouraged from liking content that might be ‘edgy’ in fear of retaliation from trolls, or to protect their public image,” as said by Haofei Wang, X engineer on the platform this week.
Yeah, we are making likes private.Public likes are incentivizing the wrong behavior. For example, many people feel discouraged from liking content that might be “edgy” in fear of retaliation from trolls, or to protect their public image.
Soon you’ll be able to like without… https://t.co/vPGllc4pB0
— Haofei (@wanghaofei) May 22, 2024
He also gave an interesting tip on building a more credible For You tab on X for the users. “The more posts you like, the better your ‘For you’ algorithm will become,” Wang adds in the post here. You should also know that X Premium users always had the option to hide their likes, but the platform now wants to remove that feature altogether.
One of the biggest detractors of changes like these has been former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who was trying to see the point of this change and how it differs from a bookmark. To which, Wang said, “Like is visible between you and the author, the author will be notified, but not anyone else. Bookmark is only visible to you.”
So, what he means is that, if you want to like a post and not make it controversial in the public, the upcoming feature is meant for you. Decisions like these have clearly left many people unimpressed with what Musk and Co. are trying to do with Twitter, now called X.
Recently, the platform’s domain name was switched from the legacy Twitter.com to X.com, which marks the final chapter in the history of the Jack Dorsey-run platform. Apart from that, Musk also plans to charge people for making posts in the near future, which could make the platform less popular for millions going forward.
