Hiding likes on Twitter – yayy or nay?

Ever since Elon Musk took charge of Twitter in a hostile takeover, he has been continuously making decisions that has been leaving Twitter’s employees, users and the world of tech and politics shocked in equal measure.

The first shock came when Elon removed blue tick verification for select individuals and converted it into a paid subscription model. Then he changed the platform’s name to X and fired most of its original employees.

Some of his decisions, like imposing a limit on the number of tweets every single user can read, did not work out and were hence, rolled back. But now, the tech titan recently removed one of twitter’s oldest features, i.e. the likes.

From now on, the likes you get for a post as well as the posts you like will only be visible to you. You also cannot see what posts other people liked, which was something people could do by easily scrolling to a user’s profile. In short, likes are entirely private.

Elon Musk has brought this change into effect, arguing that making likes private will help in making sure people can like the posts they want to freely, without receiving any judgement from other users. But many users have been criticizing this move saying that this will result in lesser engagement in the long run.

Some others have been mocking Elon for making some back-to-back drastic changes to the platform. Only time will tell whether this feature will stay in the app or rolled back due to its lack of popularity.