If you spend any time using App X, formerly Twitter, it’s only natural that you’ll get some questionable replies. It’s common. You look at a tweet and don’t understand the context. Are they joking? Are they going along with the joke? Are they being funny or, for lack of a better word, being an asshole? So you’re left thinking: “How do I interpret this?”
There used to be a way to get around this by checking Twitter likes, but in June X made everyone’s likes private, which seemed like a relatively mild and innocuous change by Musk’s standards, but in practice it made the site significantly worse.
Twitter likes were the most efficient and effective way to see someone’s online soul. A quick scroll gave me context. I went to the Likes tab on their profile and saw that they’d liked a ton of posts by, well, assholes; congratulations, you’d met an asshole and moved on. Conversely, if they’d liked good posts, you could safely assume they were making fun of the assholes.
Privatizing likes, like privatizing most other things, benefited the few at the expense of the public good. Elon Musk admitted that this was to protect people who get “attacked” online for liking a post. But he seems more like he’s patronizing the neurotic edgelords who want to like hurtful or offensive things without suffering any consequences. Musk himself is the poster child for right-wing edgelords, a god-like figure. Do you think he wants his likes public? Public likes offered a thin layer of protection, but at least it was a tool to encourage better online behavior. You might ask yourself: “Do I want people to see that I liked this?”
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Likes were a symbol of passive validation and therefore a tool to know what someone was enjoying. To be clear, I wasn’t digging through likes to attack someone. It was a quick guide to know whether to ignore or engage with someone. Or, if an account followed me, I could look at their likes and posts to determine whether they were worth following. And on a more positive note, public likes were also a great way to find good posts. I used to compile the best tweets of the week for Mashable, and scrolling through the likes of interesting people was the best way to find quality content. Many of my colleagues did the same.
Some smart people, including colleagues on other websites and some great writers, have applauded the move to private likes because it lets you like what you like and reduces the chances of online embarrassment (or, at worst, actual harassment).
But here’s the thing: if privacy was your goal, there was already a solution. In 2018 Twitter introduced bookmarks. If you wanted to save something for later, mark something you don’t agree with, or keep track of your favorite adult content, the bookmarking tool has always been there. And it’s private. So X now just provides a cover for people to “like” things they find offensive or hurtful. It’s a tool for the worst people to promote the worst content they see on the platform. Likes used to mean something. Now they’re just a number.
And think of all the stories we would have lost if public likes didn’t exist. We would never have seen Jason Sudeikis liking posts from people who hate him. Ted Lasso. We would never have known that Donald Trump had liked a rather bizarre 2013 tweet from a stranger posing in his home and shouting about convicted murderer Jodi Elias online. And most importantly, without public liking, we would never have seen Ted Cruz’s account liking porn from an account aptly named “@SexuallPosts.”
The website, formerly known as Twitter, was once a platform for people to show off their hobbies and a must-visit place to see the most interesting and important things happening online. Making likes private isn’t the worst thing Musk has done to degrade the user experience on X (there are a lot of things like that), but it hasn’t made things better, just more boring.
