After Axing Headlines, Elon Musk To Hide Retweet, Like Buttons On Twitter
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.
On Friday morning, Musk apparently posted about hiding the retweet, like and reply buttons from the main Twitter interface, a day after the company began stripping out headlines from shared news articles.
“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,” he wrote. “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 has also chimed in, and said that the retweet and like buttons over the Twitter/X mobile app could be dropped for a more Tinder-like experience. “Rn (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 potentially 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 from the public. 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
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