The story of Bluesky will long be remembered. The social network was born as a copy of Twitter, now known as X, and in the first year of its existence it barely managed to attract 15 million users. This changed in November; As I write these words, Bluesky surpassed 23.3 million users and its growth continues at a very high rate, to the point that it threatens Threads, the other alternative to X.
It's not just that people are trying Bluesky: it's that they're also deleting their X accounts, resulting in a drop in interactions on the social network. The straw that broke the camel's back was perhaps Donald Trump's victory in the presidential elections, with Elon Musk as his great ally; or it could be the billionaire's latest controversial decisions, like training AI with user posts or declaring that all X accounts are the property of Elon Musk.
Regardless, it's obvious that X is noticing this user migration, and for the first time, we're seeing a reaction; although it may not be the reaction we expected. X app developer May Ly has confirmed a significant change to the way statistics for messages posted in X are displayed; From now on, Users can hide buttons and numbers of replies, retweets and “likes”, which until now were displayed under each message.
This change is striking because It's a 180 degree turn regarding the changes that Elon Musk implemented during his time running Twitter, now the social network (although he was criticized for being “bloated”). In the same way, the interaction figures have had great importance in the interface of the X application.
As a result, the company decided that these numbers were not important and could be hidden; Although at the moment this option is not activated by default, and it is necessary to enter the application settings to activate it.
This may be a coincidence, and this decision may have nothing to do with X's loss of users and drop in engagement; Musk himself defends the change by stating that so the interface is cleaner. But it's a curious change, to say the least, in the worst moment the platform has gone through so far; at least, as far as its user base is concerned.
Meanwhile, Bluesky has taken another step to become more like Twitter, with an update that adds a new way to Sort the answers by how “hot” they are; In other words, it allows you to first display the responses that have received the most interactions in the form of replies or “Like”, as was done on Twitter. The option was enabled by default, although we could override it with the classic Bluesky method of showing old replies first.
