Twitter is bringing this change to the feature people “didn’t like” – Times of India

Last year, Twitter started showing the view count for all tweets just like people can see view counts on YouTube videos. However, the change didn’t receive a warm welcome and received harsh criticism from users and an ex-employee alike. The company CEO Elon Musk then asked Twitterati where should the “view counter” be moved.
Twitter view count location change
Twitter announced via a tweet that the view count feature will now be shifted from the extreme left to the right side.
“Many of you didn’t like seeing view counts on the left. We heard you. View counts will now show on the right side of your Tweet, located between the Like and Share icons. Live on the web, iOS and Android coming soon!,” Twitter Support announced in a tweet.

What is Twitter view count?
Twitter view count is a little bar graph that tells the number of times a particular tweet has been seen. Users can also see the count by accessing tweet analytics. Tweets now have five options with icons: Reply, Retweet, Likes, View Count and Share.
After the feature was rolled out in December, Musk said, “Twitter is much more alive than people think.”

View count feature is “depressing”, says ex-employee
Soon after the launch, there was a lot of conversation around the feature and an ex-employee, who claimed that he worked on it, also chimed in saying Twitter removed the feature because it was “depressing.”
Twitter’s former employee Paul Stamatiou quoted Musk’s tweet and replied that he worked on the feature in 2015, the team tested it but found out that the feature was “depressing” and wasn’t worth investing in.
“I worked on this at Twitter in 2015. IIRC we tested it and most people didn’t get any views and we had to have some thresholds before showing it as ‘0 views’ was depressing. We also wanted to be accurate and not count if someone quickly scrolls past your tweet in their TL,” Stamatiou tweeted.

He explained that the platform also explored the idea of showing view count only for ‘notable tweets’ (purportedly tweets by notable personalities) but this actually defeated the feature’s purpose, which was to let people show that they were not “Tweeting into the void”. Those with zero views on their tweets actually proved “they kinda were” [tweeting into the void].
“[It] felt like a useless vanity thing to show that wasn’t worth investing in further,” Stamatiou noted.
Stamatiou essentially pointed out the stigma associated with ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ on social media platforms. Simply put, people are usually under pressure of being liked/ noticed and relate the number of views/ likes with their acceptance on social media platforms.

If people get less likes/ views, they start losing interest in using that service. This is the case with apparently all social media platforms, including Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram. It is to be noted that Instagram offers its users a way to hide likes on posts.
The social media platform said that they are “making like counts private to reduce the pressure of posting to your Feed. We hope this will help people focus more on the photos and videos, rather than on how many likes a post received.”