Twitter, Now X, Is Rumored To Be Experimenting With Hiding All Statistics Beneath Replies To Tweets

In a rumored move that seems primarily designed to frustrate us at Know Your Meme, X / Twitter is said to be experimenting with removing statistics showing the number of likes and reposts beneath replies to tweets.

Haofei Wang, an engineer at the site, appeared to confirm that the site was experimenting with the feature, replying to the account @XDaily, "This is not the final design, we are still iterating on it internally. It’s hard to iterate without making changes privately, which is why we sometimes have changes hidden. It’s not ready for public release yet."

Wang did not provide a reason for why the site formerly known as Twitter was experimenting with the feature, leaving users to guess as to why the site might want replies' statistics hidden. The most common theory is that the site wants to eliminate the "Ratio."

The concept of "The Ratio" has morphed over the years. It initially meant that the ratio of replies to a tweet to the tweet's retweets and likes was an indication of the tweet's "quality" — the more a tweet had replies vs. likes, the worse the tweet. When the number of replies and quote-tweets were eventually hidden by Twitter, "Ratioing" someone meant replying to a tweet and generating significantly more likes and retweets than the original post.

Someone whose tweets often receive replies that vastly outperform their own is Elon Musk, and many suspected that the "hiding a reply's statistics" idea may have come from Musk himself.

While the theory that Elon Musk is trying to implement the change to stop getting ratioed is speculation, it is in line with his prior behavior on the app.

In February 2023, he was reportedly so incensed that President Joe Biden's tweet about the Super Bowl outperformed his own that he called a 2 a.m. meeting to order the remaining skeleton crew of Twitter employees to juice his tweets.

When the site removed quote-tweets from the list of statistics displayed on tweets in September 2023, users also theorized that the change was made by Elon Musk so that he could stop getting ratioed on the platform.