The retweet and like buttons have long been a fixture on Twitter/X. But it looks like Elon Musk wants to hide them, forcing users to go through an additional tap to access them.
A day after the company began stripping out headlines from shared news articles, Musk tweeted: “Next, we'll remove all the action buttons with their superfluous interaction counts from the main timeline. Just view count will show, unless you tap into a post. This will greatly improve readability.”
It seems Musk posted the statement to a paywalled Twitter account, preventing non-subscribers from seeing the tweet. But @xDaily managed to grab a screenshot of his tweet.
Company product designer Andrea Conway also chimed in and said that the retweet and like buttons on the Twitter/X mobile app could be dropped for a more Tinder-like experience. Right now, “the plan is to remove both, but to do more with gestural interactions (double tap to like + looking at some swipe to reply stuff now too),” she tweeted.
We’ll have to wait and see, but the changes could annoy users by making it harder to retweet or like tweets. The company’s decision this week to remove headlines from shared URL links, thus leaving only the image, has already faced some backlash. Now users, particularly news publishers, have to manually type in the headline to a shared link or else crucial context is lost.
Others say the change could be a phishing risk. “Funny outcome of hiding headlines is people will click out of Twitter MORE to see what the F the articles are about. Every link is now a curiosity gap teaser,” one user noted.
In the meantime, Musk has signaled he’s preparing more controversial changes for Twitter/X. Last month, he said the company would expand the paid subscription options for the platform. A user has since spotted code in the app that suggests the current paid subscription will be broken up into three tiers, one with full ads, the second with half ads, and the third with no ads at all.