Likes Are Now Private on X, the Perfect Solution Is… Bringing Back Nintendo’s Miiverse?

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The website X has made some large scale changes since the high-profile and expensive private buyout from Elon Musk in October 2022, chief among those being, and you might remember this, the website once used to be called Twitter.

In the past week previously public information became totally private – it’s now no longer possible to view anyone’s Liked posts. What would have previously been a tab on a user’s profile you could scroll down is now inaccessible. The privacy of a Like is now solely between the giver and the receiver, and away from the prying eyes of the public, though the Like count is still very much a marker of success for a post, partially informing its placement on the site’s “For You” and “Discover more” segments.

There’s a few consequences from this decision – it’s harder to get a feel for a new follower’s other interests and see at a glance if they might be worth a follow mutually. It’s also hard to know which of your existing followers are vibing with something that’s been posted – you can’t see if someone agrees with a post without them now typing a response. If you rely on Likes as a marker of quality, you’re only able to see the scale of response instead of basing your opinion on the relationships you’ve built over time. Some may like that – the quality of the argument should win out over whether it’s popular with your in-group, after all – though some might not. As Elon Musk would put it, Vox Populi, Vox Dei.

In theory this is a way for your Likes to become more uninhibited. You’re now more incentivised (or more accurately, less disincentivised) to interact with content that may have raised an eyebrow and a comment from your peers. Interestingly, this change has appeared not long after the decision to entirely permit pornography on X, a move that reverses a decision that other social network Tumblr famously made. I won’t labor this point by explaining further – you can put two and two together there (which I hear often happens in pornography).

Anyway, what’s this got to do with Miiverse? Well, the short-lived social media service on the Nintendo 3DS and Wii U was beloved by a devoted audience and admired from afar by people who thought it was a camp delight. Because posts could be shared with the exact moment in the game that they referenced, it meant a lot of great content like the adventure of the user Pauly playing through Super Metroid for the first time.

Posts could be given a “Yeah!” which was the Miiverse equivalent of a Like on X. Getting rid of the public Like on X meant that an equivalent way to engage with content without necessarily needing to form words to do it needed to emerge. What better way than copying the work of your favourite other social network?

Where this trend has evolved, though, is users have designed templates of their fandom in place of the weird green guy, along with alternate reaction images that aren’t just Yeah! in the same format.

Honest review? I don’t expect this trend will survive the rest of the year, but it’s a small snapshot of a moment where people are trying to figure out the next emerging etiquette around the alteration of a system they’ve taken for granted.

If, for whatever reason, you want to involve IGN in this trend, we’ve provided the appropriate reaction below:

Mat Jones is IGN’s UK Social Coordinator, and will turn back into a pumpkin at midnight.

This post was originally published on IGN

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