Twitter’s new view counts show the gap between eyeballs and engagement

Hey. You. Do you ever get curious about exactly how many people read your tweets and just…completely ignore them?

No?

Too bad. Twitter has slapped a view count on every single one of your tweets, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

If you’re thinking, Wait, didn’t Twitter already have view counts? well, yes, but before this update, you had to go and manually click on the “Analytics” button under your tweet if you wanted to indulge in that particular brand of masochism. Now those view counts are right there, in your eyes, at all times, and are positioned so you see them first, before comments, retweets, and likes.

According to Twitter, the point of this is so you can “easily see the reach of your Tweets and the Tweets you see on the Timeline.”

(Oh yeah, did we mention you can view counts on other people’s tweets, too? And they can see view counts on yours. Fun and awesome!)

According to Elon Musk—who is for some reason still running Twitter even though users voted him out as CEO in a Dec. 18 poll—having a public tweet view count is comparative to video platforms like YouTube.

“This is normal for video,” he said in a tweet about the update, adding that the new metric “[s]hows 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.”

He later added that “Tweets are read ~100 times more than they are liked.”

From what we’ve observed, that seems about right—so as soul-crushing as it feels, if your tweet is seen 100 times and only gets one like, then congratulations, it is a normal tweet.

All jokes aside, for some people seeing these metrics can be truly damaging to their mental health, so we want to say that there are ways around having to see view counts. If you use Chrome or Firefox on desktop, there’s information about blocking view counts here. You can also use TweetDeck, which doesn’t display view counts and also erases a lot of Twitter’s other unpopular updates, like the ol’ non-chronological timeline. For now, it looks like there isn’t a solution for mobile Twitter users, but if we spot one, we’ll update this story to include it.