Twitter users noticed a major change in their feeds yesterday (December 22) when all of a sudden tweet views were made visible and the retweet and like buttons were shifted around. Twitter CEO Elon Musk rolled out a new feature update in which tweets show how many times a post has been seen. This follows in the footsteps of the video model, where fellow tweeters are shown how many views a video has accumulated.
Musk announced on Thursday: “Twitter is rolling out View Count, so you can see how many times a tweet has been seen! This is normal for video. Shows how much more alive Twitter is than it may seem, as over 90% of Twitter users read, but don’t tweet, reply or like, as those are public actions.”
Twitter is rolling out View Count, so you can see how many times a tweet has been seen! This is normal for video.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 22, 2022
Shows how much more alive Twitter is than it may seem, as over 90% of Twitter users read, but don’t tweet, reply or like, as those are public actions.
He wrote in another tweet: “Tweets are read ~100 times more than they are liked.” In a new poll made in the wee hours Friday morning, Musk asked if the impressions should be moved from the left to the right, adding in a follow-up tweet: “So you’re saying you prefer the right? Heheh.”
So you’re saying you prefer the right? Heheh
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 23, 2022
Twitter users almost unanimously shared the same thoughts on the unnecessary update that apparently no one asked for. “Get rid of it,” wrote one Twitter user.
Get rid of it
— Von 🐼🇭🇳 (@FreshPrinceYuup) December 23, 2022
Another user responded to Musk’s poll and added a new option: “”C) go away — it was already available through insights. From a UI perspective, it doesn’t make sense to be there, the other items are posting tools (like, reply, rt) and this one is just randomly there for no reason.”
One person pointed out how the view counts could be high, but the like count stays the same.
watching the view count go up but the likes stay the same pic.twitter.com/kRq5YAoFxD
— matt (@mattxiv) December 22, 2022
Since the billionaire acquired the platform in October, he has rolled out several new additions and made some controversial moves, including suspending several prominent journalists who cover him, as well as Twitter’s decision to ban, and then un-ban, links to other social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram and Mastodon, a fast-growing Twitter rival that has octupled in size since October.