Revamping Social Media: X's Innovative Shift in User Experience

"A software engineer at X said the social media giant could remove likes and reposts from view on the timeline 'within the next few weeks.'".

"I'm not doing work on this change myself, but employees are still dogfooding it. It should be rolled out gradually to users over the next couple of weeks, and the UX may be different by then," posted X software engineer Ellis Driscoll on April 29.

Drsicoll's comments come after a demo video of the unreleased user experience (UX) in which a separate menu on the home screen contains likes and reposts. It was originally shared by X's head of payments, Christopher Stanley.

Driscoll pointed out that the video shared by Stanley was actually just the "more" menu and not necessarily an overarching UX for X users. He said the main functionality of the new UX would be made up of "simple gestures.".

"Liking should be just as snappy. Replying should be quicker," he said.

Notably, any user of X would be in a position to display the number of likes and reposts on any given post but will have to click over each of those successively in order to know those metrics.

Stanley added that the new user interface would see users engage with posts by way of a "long press and then swipe to choice," something he said was "kinda like a video game interface.

This comes after Instagram hid the public like counts—dubbed 'hearts'—on its app in 2021 to try and make it possible to appease mental health concerns around the app by downranking like-based competition between typically younger users of the social media platform.

However, X has not really offered much by the way of a material explanation for why it is removing likes—except several comments from Stanely which alluded to the new features being more focused on upgrading the UX and fitting as much content on the screen as possible.

Several accounts on X suggest that the new model would help shift focus towards the substance of the posts themselves and help put some brakes on the flood of posts that may be more concerned with garnering engagement. Meanwhile, critics pointed out the new feature could help the social media platform push content that appealed to its internal teams without users being able to identify why a post is trending, much like Instagram and TikTok.