It’s a tragic day for nosy people, as likes on X have now been officially made private. Earlier this week, X’s engineering team announced that it would be “making Likes private for everyone to better protect your privacy.”
In other words, if you were hoping to snoop a little on other people’s likes, you can’t do that anymore. Which sucks, because you can tell a lot about a person based on their likes.
Where have likes on X gone?
While the like count on X still shows on public posts, only the post author will be able to see who liked what. But there’s now no ‘Likes’ tab when you browse (or stalk) other people’s profiles.
When logging on this week, users also got a pop-up notification saying: “Liking more posts will make your ‘For you’ feed better.” This suggests that likes will play an enhanced role in determining X’s algorithm for individual users.
Previously, the option to hide likes was only available to paying Premium subscribers.
Users react to likes removal
Like everything traumatic on the internet, users responded how they do best: with memes.
In my opinion, this is truly worse than when they got rid of Instagram likes and Snapchat best friends. What’s a girl performing for an imaginary audience of voyeurs to do?
