In Yet Another Contentious Change, Elon Musk Announces That He Wants To Hide 'Likes And Reposts' Stats On Twitter

Elon Musk has certainly changed a lot about Twitter since purchasing it last year, but one thing he has in common with the site's previous owners is introducing UI changes that are largely unpopular with the platform.

In Musk's apparent crusade against the site's posts having statistics (he announced he was hiding quote-retweets last month), he has now voiced his intention of hiding repost and like statistics on the site, leaving the relatively newer addition of "views" as the only metric users will see when scrolling through a timeline.

In a paywalled tweet, Musk told the people paying him to read his content that he'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." The tweet was reposted to the Twitter populace by @xDaily shortly after.

This follows another controversial change Musk recently made in which links to news stories stopped embedding the article's headline and lede in posts, leaving behind only the article's header or thumbnail image.

Musk put the onus on news publications to write their headline in the body of a tweet, but users quickly demonstrated how the change could be used to spread misinformation by writing their own "headlines" over links to completely unrelated news stories.

Similarly, many users voiced how removing the number of likes and retweets from a post on the home timeline (a specific tweet's engagement statistics will still be visible should you click on it) only serves to make the site more confusing.

Likes and retweets are key metrics in understanding the popularity or virality of a tweet — this is why Know Your Meme includes those statistics when documenting popular posts on Twitter. Without those statistics immediately visible, many users feared their timelines would become a hodgepodge of tweets with no indication of how important they are to any given conversation.

If the change goes through, it's unclear how it would help Musk achieve his goal of making Twitter profitable, though he may need the cash flow — as the site's revenue tanks due to advertisers reportedly fleeing the site, Musk is facing multiple lawsuits, including a parental custody suit from his former partner, Grimes.