X (formerly Twitter) has rolled out a new feature that lets users hide likes, shares and reposts and interact with posts with custom swipe gestures as the platform struggles with declining user numbers and privacy concerns.
May Ly, an iOS engineer at X, announced the new feature for iPhones on Thursday, posting: “Now you can hide buttons and engagement numbers under each post and interact with posts with custom swipe gestures!”
Custom swipe gestures allow X users to like or interact with a post. However, hiding buttons and wiring numbers is optional and must be enabled using the X setting.
“It’s much cleaner with the engagement numbers off,” wrote X owner Elon Musk, adding, “You can still see the view count if you’re interested.”
One X user didn’t seem impressed, writing sarcastically: “I wouldn’t care but since it has a million views I guess I should check it out.”
Over at Bluesky, in reference to the new feature, news analyst Oliver Alexander skeeted: “Remove the engagement numbers that require people to actually interact with the content, but keep the artificially inflated ‘views’ number.”
“A perfect way to try to hide the declining engagement levels,” he added.
This new feature follows a mass exodus from X over the past few weeks. Many former users headed to Bluesky, which to date has amassed more than 21 million followers, most of whom have joined very recently.
On November 6, the day after the US presidential election, X experienced its biggest user loss since Musk bought the platform in November 2022, NBC News reported.
Responding to the many ex-X users who have migrated to other platforms, political commentator Emma Burnell posted on Bluesky: “At some point last night, my BlueSky follower count surpassed my X count. It’s taken me over a decade to reach that number to the darkest timeline.”
“At the same time, engagement on BlueSky – especially with my newsletter – is much higher. What happened to X is a case study in destruction.”
In addition, Company X inserted a new clause in its terms of service, which was said to prevent other companies from training their AI on their users’ content.
The terms state that “in addition to any other legal remedies available to us, you will be jointly and severally liable to us for damages as set forth below for requesting, viewing or accessing more than 1,000,000 Posts (including Response Posts , follower posts and any other posts) in any 24-hour period – $15,000 per 1,000,000 posts.”
