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X, formerly known as Twitter, is "definitely" going to remove the number of "likes" and retweets from feeds, Elon Musk said Wednesday night.
"That is definitely happening," Musk said in response to a post on X about the change. "Just view count, as proxy for the other metrics, will show on the timeline."
An X employee responded to the changes positively, writing: "Feels like we're growing up."
Users may still be able to see the total number of likes and retweets on a post if they click into the post, but those metrics won't be visible when scrolling through X's "For You" and "Following" tabs.
One X poll with over 8,000 votes at time of writing finds that 87% don't want the change to occur, with about 13% voting in favor of hiding the like and retweet counts from feeds.
Since Musk's Twitter takeover, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO has made overall per-post impression counts publicly visible. Previously, only the tweet's creator could view a post's analytics, which would show the overall view count. Musk also enabled the ability to make a user's "likes" tab private, even if their account is public.
It's possible the change to repost and like counts is being made to declutter the platform's visual design. It's also likely an effort to further emphasize views over whether users "liked" a post or not. It's unclear whether reply counts will remain or also disappear from feeds, however.
Social media sites hiding the number of "likes" on content has become more commonplace. Of the major platforms, Instagram and Facebook allow users to manually hide the number of likes from being publicly viewable on their own posts. Threads users can also hide the number of likes and shares on their posts. YouTube users can private their "likes" and hide "like" counts on their videos as well. YouTube has also hidden the number of "dislikes" on videos for everyone, arguing that it's helped reduced harassment on the Google-owned platform.