I suppose it does remove any ability for validation though.
Currently you can see when all the likes are spam accounts (this has been getting worse, like 9 to 1 I've seen on my own account), and theoretically you can verify that Elon didn't type in a random like-count.
I think he liked a cringe anime content tweet before. Someone noticed and took a screenshot of it, when it circulated on Twitter people predicted that he would make likes private.
I'd want to hide them too if I were one of these politicians out here liking all kinds of stuff they probably shouldn't like on main under their whole a** Christian name 😂
the longer I think about it the more insidious - it’s now just a number they set to boost/suppress/etc. and no way even to tell if your number and my number match…
because right wingers are convinced everyone agrees with them and their posts are good, and keep coming up with increasingly elaborate explanations for why they’re not popular: “shadowbanning” “everyone wants to like my post but they’re afraid of woke leftists criticising them”
when this goes into effect and they do not, in fact, end up hyper popular, they will start a new panic about woke engineers in the walls at twitter sneaking out to do shadowbanning while musk isn’t looking, or whatever they need to explain their failure to Post Good
It's also useful if your social media site becomes a vehicle for porn delivery. You don't really want everyone to know what kind of things you are in to.
It’s going to be funny when it turns out that no, people weren’t afraid to like your “edgy” content. They really just don’t like it. I just can’t with the way the cognitive dissonance.
To disguise the diminishing number of interactions going on on the platform as people move to better places.
For anyone who's moved recently, welcome to Bluesky.
We have cat pictures.
Did musk and his nazi fans just not realize that twitter already had an option to hide your likes? Or is that one of the many features musk removed on a whim?
Hidden Likes were first rolled out last August, but only for subscribers.
Since that wasn't enough to convince people to pay Elon $8 a month though, he's decided to make it platform-wide instead, diminishing the value of the subscription again.
So he took an existing free feature on twitter, made people pay for it instead and then when that failed decided to just scrap it and remove having an option altogether. Yep, that sounds like elon
I used to relax on Twitter bc it was intelligent, humorous, current etc. I had family in the ICU & aging parents. I needed an outlet. Twitter/X continues to decline. Likes or lack of likes are not going to change the ecosystem. It’s depressing. I miss laughing hysterically.
It might change the ecosystem, but definitely not for the better.
This new policy seems purposefully designed to encourage the worst possible opinions for people using the platform.
Everyone he says he likes hates the ratio. They hate seeing their tweets as screenshots with the numbers accusing them while everyone laughs.
And they hate having their bad likes analyzed (and who is liking their bad takes) and their horny likes gossiped about (when they should just own them)
