Featured Image Credit: Marc Piasecki / Contributor / NurPhoto / Contributor / Getty
Remember back in the day when Twitter was the social media platform of choice, letting us share our opinions safely under the blue hue of that flapping bird? It all changed when Elon Musk bought the platform in October 2022 and rebranded to the much harsher look of X in July 2023, the Twitter we knew and loved officially kicked the bucket.
Since buying Twitter, Musk has made sweeping changes to the service like paying for blue ticks, rolling back the block feature, and locking Twitter API behind a paywall.
The divisive updates continue, and as X hemorrhages users to the much more serene Bluesky, some major celebrities have called it quits on X in favor of Bluesky. And thanks to Musk's latest update, he could lose even more.
It might only be a minor tweak, but X has changed how posts are formatted. As shared by Pop Base, views are now shown above a tweet and you can no longer see the exact time it was posted. In terms of not seeing the time as the post was made, we imagine it could become a dangerous minefield.
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With this being the latest blunder amid theories Musk is trying to run X into the ground, users are making their disdain clear.
Someone complained: "I don’t even care about the views part, but removing the exact date and time gotta be one of the worst updates this app has ever gotten honestly."
Another grumbled: "Elon literally tries his hardest to make the app as trash as possible."
A third concluded: "This is terrible. We need the exact time stamps for evidence."
Twitter/X has updated the way tweets are formatted.
— Pop Base (@PopBase) December 5, 2024
Views are now displayed above a tweet, instead of below. You can also no longer see the exact time a tweet was made. pic.twitter.com/FGFuZfS6am
Notably, most agreed it was a completely unnecessary change that doesn't do anything to alleviate fears that Musk doesn't know what he's doing. Although we don't know how involved Musk is with the day-to-day running of X, we have to assume he signed off on the change or at least approved otherwise he'd change it back.
Also, considering there isn't an option to edit tweets without paying for Twitter Blue, we're surprised he hasn't put a timestamp option behind a subscription.
If Musk's plan was to lose a fortune on X, it seems to be working. Axios and Fidelity report that X has lost some $32 billion in worth since Musk took over. Fidelity says the former social media monolith is worth 72% less than the $44 billion Musk paid for it. He notably lost around $2 billion when major brands including The Coca-Cola Company and The Kellogg Company stopped advertising on the site.
Despite this, there's actually been an apparent 32% uptick in X's stock price. As Bluesky continues to climb, it could be panic stations over at X HQ. We might be putting our time into trying to claw back users rather than making hated changes to X.
