Former employee tells why ‘newly-launched’ view count feature doesn’t make Twitter ‘alive’ – Times of India

Elon Musk announced earlier this week that Twitter’s View Count feature will show all users how many times a tweet has been seen. The CEO said the feature will show how much more alive Twitter is than it may seem. However, a former employee has claimed that the social media company tested the feature way back in 2015 and they found it wasn’t worth investing in.
Twitter’s former employee Paul Stamatiou (via The Verge) quoted Musk’s tweet and replied that he worked on the feature. He said that the team tested it but found out that the feature was “depressing.”
“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 wrote.

Why did Twitter ‘kill’ the feature
Stamatiou said Twitter then explored the idea of showing view count only for ‘notable tweets’ (purportedly tweets by notable personalities). However, it actually defeated the feature’s purposes, which was to let people show that they were not “Tweeting into the void” but zero views on posts 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 appears to mean that those who got 0 views were actually under pressure of the social stigma of being liked/ noticed. If people note – by seeing less views on their tweets – that no-one/ very few people read what they post, they tend to lose interest in further using that service.

Meta-owned Instagram also rolled out a feature that allows users to hide the likes on their 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.”
Twitter analytics
It is a known fact that views and likes are necessary to generate revenue from advertising but not all those who use Twitter can monetise. Moreover, getting views is not always for the right reasons. There are chances that people may have “viewed” your tweet because you posted something the masses don’t agree with. In such cases, you are unlikely to generate a revenue stream.
Twitter allows users to take a look at the detailed analysis of their post by clicking/ tapping the little graph with “View Tweet activity” written alongside it. You can see impressions, Details expands, Profile visits, New followers and Engagements at one place.
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