By Emmanuel Ogbodo
A significant redesign is coming to X, formerly known as Twitter, which might not sit well with many users. The platform plans to eliminate interaction and engagement buttons such as repost (retweet), like, and reply from individual posts in users’ feeds. This also includes removing the repost, like, and reply counts from posts.
Instead of using buttons, users will need to swipe left or right on a post to like or reply, while iOS users can force touch a post to access additional options. The only visible metric on a post will be the view count, relocated to the upper right corner.
This change was first spotted by researcher Aaron Perris of MacRumors and later confirmed by X owner Elon Musk. User feedback has been largely negative. Musk, however, defended the change, suggesting, “Just swipe left to like and right to reply.”
Since acquiring the company in October 2022, Musk has introduced several major changes, including renaming Twitter to X. In the most recent significant update, Musk made most “likes” private, limiting visibility of who liked a post to the post’s author only.
Musk has confirmed that the removal of repost and like buttons is another long-intended update. In a subscriber-only post last October, he stated, “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.”
Notably, Musk has previously reversed decisions after negative feedback. For instance, when headlines were removed from article links shared within posts, user criticism led to their reintroduction within two months, albeit with a new design. A similar reversal could happen if the removal of repost and like buttons proves to be problematic. Musk has indicated a willingness to revert the changes if they don’t work out.
