Elon Musk considering making huge change to how we use X

You can say many things about Elon Musk, but he's not afraid to tinker with his toys.

The billionaire owner of Tesla and social media platform X (formerly Twitter) has announced his intention to make a pretty fundamental change to how people browse X.

According to a post today, Musk intends to remove the metrics underneath posts that have underpinned the platform for years.

That is definitely happening. Just view count, as proxy for the other metrics, will show on the timeline

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 7, 2024

At the moment, as you scroll through your feed in the app or on the X website, you'll see that every post has four metrics underneath it - the number of replies, reposts, likes and views it's got.

And if you click on a post, you can also see the number of times it's been bookmarked - but Musk could be planning to change all of this.

He wrote that the change is "definitely happening", adding: "Just view count, as proxy for the other metrics, will show on the timeline".

We don't know exactly how this might play out - presumably the other metrics will be hidden, but you might be able to see them by tapping a new option.

This would constitute a massive rejig of how X looks, and would interestingly make it potentially harder to see why a post has made it into your feed.

After all, as it stands you can glance at a post and see whether it's, for example, been hugely liked, or has by contrast sparked a massive wave of discussion with replies and reposts.

This would hide that information, albeit to a degree that is hard to judge at this stage.

Musk's announcement is typical of how he's trialled features coming to X, too - in the form of just a quick post. This doesn't give us a timeline for when the change will happen, and it's also perfectly possible that it won't even take place - or it could be trialled and scrapped.

Previously Musk got rid of the headlines on links embedded in posts, leaving just an image with a link, but this was rolled back after widespread complaints that it made it impossible to know what you were clicking on when you followed a link on the platform.

The reaction to Musk's latest announcement isn't exactly positive, either, with one popular response saying: "I'm sorry, but this is a horrible idea. Many users are not going to agree with removing counts for likes or reposts from the feed."

Another user wrote: "Just read the replies no one wants this" - but don't be surprised if this change to how X looks goes ahead regardless.