Why Hide Likes?

Tales of the ongoing degradation of the social media site formerly known as Twitter.

This week X was extremely excited to announce to me that my likes… which is to say my tapping the little heart button on posts… would be private going forward.  I mean, they change things all the time and don’t really spend a lot of time promoting them, but this one got a big pop-up announcement in my feed.

Are we worried about likes now?

My first thought on seeing this was… so?

I mean, why bother?  Also, it was, of course, broken in some ways on the first day because that is what you get with X.com these days.  I guess they had a plan at one point to hide your likes only if you paid.

This was the old message

So why hide likes?

Then I considered the source.  It seems likely that Elon is perhaps tired of being dragged constantly for liking racist, white nationalist, conspiracy theories on X.

But that doesn’t really track.  I mean, it starts by assuming Elon has sense of shame, which the evidence seems to indicate he does not.  Plus, he doesn’t just click the like on that sort of garbage, he repsosts it, quote posts it, and responds to it with his never once seemed insightful and oft parodied “concerning” responses.

We are talking about somebody who has no problem engaging with his own, publicly known sock puppet accounts like Adrian Dittmann.  Musk likes the attention, any attention, when he does transgressive things like boosting posts about the great replacement theory.

So it doesn’t feel like that is the real reason.  Plus, he could solve his own issue by hiding likes for blue checkmarks or, even more likely, just making the X.com devs hide his likes.  He wouldn’t hesitate to order that.

Then I remembered the new feature of X.com, which I mentioned last week; porn!  Elon decided to put the “XXX” in X.com.  And if you’re going to allow and encourage the “Nudes in Bio” bots on the platform… and Elon has solved the X.com bot problem the way Trump built that wall, which is to say not at all as the place is overrun with patently obvious bots… you don’t want to out your non-bot customers and keep them from engaging with your new feature.

This has been spun by the Elon incel fan base as “saving relationships!”

A sample of responses… at least one bot in that selection, can you spot it?

There was actually a good post of these responses over on Threads… because it isn’t just BlueSky users who obsess about X.com… however, I couldn’t find it because Threads has that Instagram algorithm that vows to never let you see anything twice.  Zuck will have his own way.

So the real goal here could be to help X.com users engage with porn without outing them to their partners.  Saving relationships… though one might ask what sort of relationship you have if your partner would be shocked or surprised by what you look at, or if you’re looking for some extracurricular activity.

Also, the idea that your likes are private… isn’t entirely true.  The account whose post you like still gets a notification… how else are you going to signal that “Nudes in Bio” bot account to slide into your DMs… so somebody out there can still out you and whatever it is you’re hiding from decent society.  Likes are hidden from random third parties, not from you or the person whose post you clicked on.  And X.com is still storing that data.  They just hid it.  So they could, theoretically change the feature back and out you all.

Until then, don’t worry, if you like my EVE Online posts, I won’t out your bad taste.

Meanwhile, Elon thinks he is being clever offering up a reward he would never pay for a dare that cannot be fulfilled.

Elon’s idea of being clever

This is, of course, a trick question.  Every time he likes a post it is the last post he liked.  Of course, I can’t leave out the possibility that he is just an inarticulate dunce and meant the last post before they turned off the visibility or likes to third parties… but that doesn’t make much sense either.  Par for the course with Elon.

Such is the state of X.com.  I deleted the app off my devices, where it is about 100x worse than in a locked down Firefox window.  Now if I could just get a few companies… Daybreak, CCP, Blizzard, are on that list… to buy in on one of the competing services I could convince myself to stop checking in on X.com.