Twitter has been the name on everyone’s tongue as Elon Musk takes over and implements his newest ideas for change on the platform. Among the most scandalous ideas is the infamous upcoming $8 verification plan in development. That’s not all that’s being updated on Twitter, though.
Musk also says that Twitter will soon free up dormant accounts, making many @handles available once again.
In the past Musk noted that Twitter needed to work out how to deal with accounts of deceased users that should possibly be memorialized in some way. It’s unclear if that’s still part of the plan. This means if there’s an @ you’ve had your eye on and it’s been inactive for a long time, you may be able to acquire it!
Musk has also stated that Tweets will soon come with a view count in an effort to increase and highlight engagement on the app.
It’s his belief that tweets have more engagement than people give them credit for. It appears that highlighting tweet engagement will show users that there is more activity on their account than mere likes and retweet sounds. And the hope is that the cycle will feed itself, encouraging users to post tweets more frequently to receive coveted attention of other users.
In the past, Twitter experimented with this. In 2014, 2017, and in September this year, Twitter launched a live test of the view count display with some users.
However, it seems this feature might do the opposite as intended. Instead of thinking that people are seeing your tweets and not engaging with them because they’re just not interested, you’d actually know this for sure. It’s hard to see how knowing that 2k people saw your tweet, and none of them engaged would encourage you to post more. This is likely why this idea has been shot down in the past.
App researcher Jane Manchun Wong has shared two images of what the new view counts might look like (left, in the app and right, on the web), based on current testing:
We will have to wait and see what’s in store for Twitter under this new reign.
