Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) is once again planning controversial design changes to the platform.
X is currently testing removing the like, comment, and retweet buttons and their counts from post replies. Views will also be removed from reply posts.
Tweet may have been deleted
This change to X has not yet been released, but was discovered by X users in the code of the latest X app @aaronp613 is not following anyone.. New features and platform changes discovered this way don’t always make it live, and sometimes they’re not even released. However, it does suggest that the company is seriously considering this move and officially testing the removal of these buttons and counts.
Removing these features will only affect the appearance of replies when viewing the original post. If the user clicks a reply, the reply’s post page will display Like, Comment, and Report buttons and views.
Mix and match speed of light
Unwelcome changes to X
Removing interaction counts from replies will undoubtedly change the culture of X by influencing the social media meme known as “ratio.” When a user posts a controversial or unpopular post on This is called a “ratio”.
Musk is no stranger to making big cultural changes at X. Tweet to X and removed the vernacular “tweet” used to refer to the post.
Recently, Musk’s X received likes from all users privatethe company admitted the move was to protect users who liked controversial posts.
However, there are also cases where X recoils from unwelcome changes. Last year, deleted Linked the title of the post because Musk didn’t like the look of it. Context-free previews quickly caused trouble for the platform and X back to normal Return to display title.
Last month, another similar X test was discovered in the code of iOS app X: deleted Like, comment, and reply buttons from the main original post when viewed in the feed. This change requires users to swipe left or right to interact with posts. As of publishing, X does not have this feature enabled.
