Real Empty Internet Theory hours, given how much of that site is flooded with bots.
Like, even when there is an active community, its punctuated with so many ads and spam account posts that real interactions are the exception rather than the rule.
The people that they are likely changing this policy for are high enough up in the social hierarchy that they can't be arsed to have more than one account, that's too much work for them and those same people are also likely the ones that are giving them money which means that he has a direct incentive to do this
Why even bother with bots? Since the like list will no longer be public they can just literally code it to artificially inflate the system to boost propaganda in the way that they want to make. Or you were able to see who was liking it so you could verify those an actual person behind it, now you can't.
With this new system there's nothing stopping a comment from being sent to the Moon likewise with only one person actually liking it ex. Musks social posts can have 80,000 likes where as only 10,000 actually liked it.
Who needs to spend money on engagement on the platform when you can fake the engagement and get the same results because members will be like oh there's a lot of people interacting with this and will interact with it as well when in reality there isn't actually much interaction with it
I don't think they can alter the number of likes received willy-nilly without attributing 1 like to 1 account, and I'm basing this thought on how a normal system would behave, as I suspect xitter still uses the equivalent of a select count(has_liked) from user_post_reaction where id_post = {whatever}; -- Changing how a normal count of likes work, without attributing them to accounts, would easily fuck up xitter real hard.
Sure, melon himself wants to believe his own delusions, but there's a lot of people that aren't him and that don't have access to the code, or the coders, and definitely want to find ways to abuse this.
Probably just for the algorithm, but then again I don't know much about how Twitter actually works.
I never cared for the idea of telling the world when I'm going to take a shit or some other completely pointless thing nor do I care to see when Major Company takes a shit either.
I am assuming that likes will be visible on a tweet but you can't look through a specific user's likes unless they allow it? Seems like a decent change tbh
Back in the day there were only re-tweets and bookmarks. Then Facebook likes became popular and Twitter changed bookmarks which could be private or public into fully public likes. So annoying. Likes should have never existed on Twitter.
My conspiracy theory on this is that Twitter Blue isn't doing well so they're doubling down on ad revenue.
Public likes disincentvise interactions, which is one metric that could be used to measure engagement, so hiding likes, along side their recent policy changes about NSFW stuff, is a way to encourage more engagement towards attention grabbing content that users were otherwise not inclined to interact with.
On the flip side of that coin, being able to see what other people like Embraces interaction because you can look at a like list see who else liked that post and then by doing so you're interacting with that post as well, where with the new system there's no longer an incentive to interact with a post unless you find it entertaining. Which I fully agree with I just think it's going to lower their overall engagement metrics
Basically it's allowed but they must properly mark it as NSFW, so it can be filtered out for minors and people who are actively trying to avoid it. More or less they're making the sharing of adult material a more legitimate thing for twitter, which is kinda hard to tell because twitter has always been filled with porn but I guess it's just more official.
Wherever or not people will actually mark their content as NSFW or if Twitter will enforce it is in the air. I've seen Twitter content sensitivity setting used more for video game spoilers than it's actual intended use.
At this point, if you're still posting on Twitter then you're suspect. That site's subtag might as well be "PUSSY IN BIO", we all know why you're there.
Someone set a timer, how long will it be before they reverse that change. VISA has been very open about not wanting to be involved with anything that is NSFW, and about time Visa reaches out and says yo we're pulling the plug on your usage of our services it's going to reverse
I have to give credit where it's due, I actually like this change. Likes used to be private, and then they became public and subject to the toxic performativity of social media
Yeah, I don't know what they were thinking when Twitter decided to make likes public by default and even go so far as to show your likes on your followers' feeds. Seemed creepy and parasocial and is one of the factors that drove me away from Twitter, so this is a good change.
I like the ideology of having private likes, the problem is you need to trust the platform in order to have a system like that, back when Lakes were private there was trust in the platform nowadays there's zero trust in the platform, it wouldn't surprise me if they're going to use this to fake engagement numbers for their userbase
My instance tried to disable downvotes and it was a fiasco.
So yeah a lot of people are keen to remove user feedback in any way possible in the hope to lessen toxicity until they notice that it's a double edged sword. People can't dislike stuff just to troll or for bad reasons. But people couldn't even downvote a spam bot and you essentially are at the mercy of anybody if a mod is not close by ready to act. Likes and dislikes are a way to outsource moderation to the users. So either X has a secret army of moderators or that will just result in a lot more trash being on the foreground.
No likes on X means that the spammers, racists, stalker will essentially be at the same level of visibility than any other user.