X owner Elon Musk appears to be spooked by the continuous flow of users leaving the social media platform in favor of alternatives like BlueSky and Meta’s Threads.
In a surprising move last week, Musk announced that the platform would start allowing users to hide likes, shares, and reposts — a suspicious decision that feels like a bid to conceal the platform’s waning energy.
“You can now hide engagement buttons and numbers below each post and interact with posts through custom swipe gestures!” X app developer May Ly tweeted last week.
Musk himself resorted to an odd excuse for the new feature.
“It’s much cleaner with engagement numbers turned off,” he wrote. “You can still see view count if you care.”
Why Musk would suddenly care about a “cleaner” user interface is a bit of a mystery. Ever since taking over the social media platform in 2022, the company has littered the network with a confusing array of colored checkmarks, unnecessary info, and a barrage of disruptive ads.
But it doesn’t take much reading between the lines to wonder if X is paying attention to the astronomic rise of Twitter alternatives BlueSky and Threads. Over the past week alone, BlueSky’s daily active users have soared to 3.5 million, a massive 300 percent increase since Election Day, according to Similarweb.
As of earlier this month, Threads had a whopping 275 monthly active users. But thanks to its breakneck momentum, Bluesky is starting to close the gap where it matters.
Even Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is anxiously paying attention, with many former Twitter power users choosing Bluesky instead of Threads in the wake of the election.
Meanwhile, Musk’s X has implemented a number of user-hostile policy changes, from requiring users to opt out of having their posts be used to train the platform’s AI chatbot to dismantling the block function, thereby opening the floodgates for even more harassment.
Hate speech and even 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥 𝓈ℯ𝓍ual abuse material have run rampant on X ever since Musk took over, turning the platform into a hellhole of disinformation and exploitation.
Last week, Musk also appeared to confirm that X was actively throttling the visibility of posts that include external links, a sign that the platform could be looking for ways to shut out outside news.
In short, who could blame users for running away?