Elon Musk intends to make website X an ‘everything app,’ incorporating messaging, banking, and shopping
On Wednesday, Elon Musk announced that X will soon conceal metrics for reposts, likes, and replies from the timeline, aiming to enhance its appearance. This marks another notable design adjustment for the social media platform, following last year’s alteration in how X showcases links to news articles.
While speaking at a Morgan Stanley event, Musk said X was considering this move, adding that this information visually clutters content on the platform.
He later confirmed this while responding to a follower on the social platform saying this was “definitely happening.”
Musk said the timeline will continue to display view counts—a feature added after he took over the social platform—“as proxy for the other metrics.”
The message he responded to suggested that the other hidden metrics would still be accessible by clicking on a post.
This isn’t Musk’s first mention of removing metrics from X’s homepage. Last year, he expressed plans to eliminate “all the action buttons with their superfluous interaction counts from the main timeline,” except for the view count.
Musk claimed this would significantly enhance readability. This announcement followed Twitter’s significant design alteration, which ceased displaying headlines on news article links. Previously, news article links appeared as “cards,” including an article’s lead image, headline, and a brief summary. This format was replaced by a clickable lead image, which was difficult to distinguish from regular timeline posts.
While some users and journalists criticized the change, Musk’s post dismissed the old cards as unattractive and stated that their repetitive text was straining to read. Musk had previously stated that the redesign aimed to “greatly improve the aesthetics” of the website. However, a few months later, X reverted the change and began overlaying headlines on top of an article’s lead image when sharing a news link.
Likes and repost counts on the timeline usually serve as an easy-to-glance marker for a tweet that has gone viral or generated a lot of engagement. But the metrics have also been used as a tool for mocking posts deemed unpopular by getting them “ratioed.” In X lingo, a post—usually made by a popular account—is considered “ratioed” when it has significantly more replies than reposts. This is because reposts are usually seen as endorsements, while replies can usually be critical. The term is also used when a reply to a post ends up receiving more reposts than the original. Musk himself is no stranger to getting “ratioed” on the platform. The proposed design change could effectively kill off the “ratio”, as users will need to click on individual posts to view the metrics.
It is important that according to a study from Edison Research X has already experienced a 30% drop in usage from 2023 to 2024,