So this week X (I still cant bring myself to call it that out loud, it's Twitter, it'll always be Twitter) quietly started hiding everybody's Likes tab. You can still see your own, apparently, but scroll to someone else's profile and that little heart-shaped breadcrumb trail of "what this person actually finds funny at 1am" is just gone.
Elon's stated reasoning, paraphrased from his own posts about it, is that people were holding back from liking anything spicy because they didn't want it showing up publicly. Which, sure, I believe that's true for some percentage of users. But I'd bet real money the bigger reason is that Likes were the single best tool on the entire platform for figuring out who a public account actually is when you strip away the performance of their posts. Your posts are the version of you that you're curating. Your likes are the version of you that slips out when you think nobody's grading the assignment.
I will fully admit to being one of those people who used to check. Not in a creepy way (okay, medium creepy). But if I was trying to figure out whether some brand-new account replying to me was a bot, a bad-faith troll, or just some guy, the Likes tab told me in about four seconds. Bots like nothing, or they like everything, indiscriminately, at 3am. Real people like a weirdly specific and revealing mix of stuff: their local sports team, three different arguments about sourdough starters, and one thirst trap they definitely didn't mean to leave public. That signal is just off the table now.
I get the privacy argument in the abstract. I really do. Nobody signed up in 2007 thinking their fav button was a permanent, searchable, public record of their id. But this is also a platform that, in the same twelve months, made your For You feed more aggressive, buried the chronological timeline two taps deep, and started charging for the blue checkmark that used to mean "this is a real notable person" and now mostly means "this person pays $8 a month." The Likes thing isn't really about protecting users. It's about protecting engagement, because a private-by-default like is a like you're more willing to hand out generously without social cost, and more likes is more time in the app is more ad impressions. I don't think that's a conspiracy theory, I think it's just how these products get built now.
Unrelated tangent, but staying on theme: this is also the week NASA and Boeing are (finally, after years of delays) getting ready to put actual astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, on top of an Atlas V for Starliner's first crewed flight. As of right now it's sitting on the pad at Cape Canaveral with a launch attempt Monday night. I have zero chill about crewed launches, I will absolutely be doing the thing where I have NASA TV on mute in a browser tab while I'm supposed to be doing something else, and if it slips again (this program has slipped so many times I've stopped being surprised) I will still watch the next attempt with the same dumb enthusiasm. There's something almost calming about a story where the stakes are physical and mechanical instead of algorithmic. A valve either works or it doesn't. Nobody's A/B testing the parachutes for engagement.
Anyway. If you're one of the people who liked one of my posts back when this blog first got going in 2011 (back when "engagement" mostly meant somebody bothered to leave a comment), thank you, genuinely, and also I hope whatever else you liked back then stays between you and the old Twitter servers forever. Some things really are better lost to time. I'm just annoyed I don't get to choose which things anymore.
I'll probably keep poking at my own Likes tab out of habit for another month before my brain fully accepts it's pointless now. Old habits and all that.