A person at X says that secret likes will be on the app as soon as today. That means that what people like on the site will be hidden by default. X Premium members can already do this. After this story came out, Elon Musk, the owner of X, shared a picture of it again, saying that it’s “important to let people like posts without getting attacked for doing so!”
The head of engineering at X, Haofei Wang, said a few weeks ago that the planned change is meant to protect users’ public image because “many people feel discouraged” to like “edgy” material. Profiles will no longer have a “Likes” tab. Enrique Barragan, a senior software engineer at X, says that users will still be able to see who liked their posts and the total number of likes, but they will not be able to see who liked someone else’s posts. In a post today, he also gave a tip about the launch.
“Soon, you won’t have to worry about who sees your likes,” Wang said in October.
Musk told the platform’s engineers at the end of last year that he wanted to get rid of the following buttons for tweets and instead focus on post views, which are also known as “impressions.” A person told me at the time that Musk wanted to get rid of the whole part with the like and repost buttons because he didn’t think likes were important.
That makes sense, the person said. “Social media is moving away from like counts in general.” “Something in me says Musk just wants to stay out from Twitter more and more.”
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