Mehul Reuben DasDec 23, 2022 16:37:50 IST
Earlier this month Elon Musk had announced that Twitter will soon start showing how many people have viewed a particular, just like YouTube shows the number of times a particular video has been watched. This week, Twitter finally launched the feature for the Twitter app on iOS and Android, and will soon start sharing the numbers on the desktop version as well.
The view counter under each tweet shows how active Twitter as a platform is. However, the counter may not be an accurate representation of the popularity or virality of a tweet, as the count may be overinflated. Image Credit: Pexels
View counters are now displayed in the app along with the amount of comments, retweets, and favourites. Not every tweet will have a visible view count, according to a Twitter FAQ. The information won’t be available for community tweets, tweets from Twitter Circles, or “older” tweets.
Twitter is rolling out View Count, so you can see how many times a tweet has been seen! This is normal for video.
Shows how much more alive Twitter is than it may seem, as over 90% of Twitter users read, but don’t tweet, reply or like, as those are public actions.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 22, 2022
“Anyone who views your Tweet counts as a view, regardless of where they see your Tweet (e.g. Home, Search, Profiles, Tweets embedded in articles, etc.) or whether or not they follow you. Even an author looking at their own Tweet counts as a view,” read the blogpost.
It also adds that looking at a tweet from the web, then looking at it on your phone would count as two views.
Musk hinted that he was attempting to make text and picture postings on the site more similar to video posts, which already had public view counts, when he launched the functionality on December 1. Additionally, he stated that it wasn’t enough to only look at answers and likes to get the whole picture, and that it was supposed to demonstrate how “active” the platform is.
He also added recently, that Tweets are read about 100 times more than they are liked, given that 90 per cent of internet users are plain, simple consumers, who just consume what has been served to them, without recording any reactions to the content, not even a like.
Tweets are read ~100 times more than they are liked
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 23, 2022
Twitter, it seems is going in the completely opposite direction, compared to what other social media platforms are doing. In fact, increasing the amount of information that is accessible to the public on a social network is the opposite of what other businesses have recently been doing. Since years, Instagram and Facebook have been developing the ability to allow users hide the number of likes their posts receive.
Even YouTube, whose public view counts have been a distinguishing element of the platform, has begun to conceal certain information; in 2021, it concealed public dislike numbers, making it so that only producers could see how many people had pressed the thumbs-down button on their videos.
