Twitter

X, formerly Twitter, now sorts your posts by like counts when logged out

Ben Schoon | Aug 16 2023 - 9:21 am PT

Since its acquisition by Elon Musk, a whole lot has changed at Twitter, including its official name which is now “X.” Another change that you might not have noticed is that profiles on Twitter now show posts, formerly known as tweets, as sorted by the count of likes rather than the order in which they were posted.

Back in June and July, before the X rebrand, Twitter briefly blocked users without an account from accessing the site in any capacity. That came to an end pretty quickly, thankfully, but we have since noticed that profiles have been altered for logged out users.

Profiles would now show all posts as sorted by their like counts. The change, which seems to have taken effect towards the last week of July based on some posts, sees all tweets in a user’s history sorted by how many likes they have received. This new sorting of Twitter profiles seems to be strictly based on likes, and not views. Posts that have more views but lower like counts show up lower in the feed.

The inspiration for this change isn’t clear, and there’s no way for a logged-out user to see tweets in chronological order. That’s a bit frustrating, as this new sorting method can easily show posts at the top of a profile from years ago while burying more recent posts. The top three posts on 9to5Google’s account, for example, are from 2022, January 2023, and 2019. On 9to5Mac’s account, top posts are from June 2023, September 2022, and June 2023.

Notably, too, the ability to see replies seems to be entirely broken when logged out at the moment, while the “Media” and “Likes” tabs require you to log in.

In the past 24 hours, X has also closed off access to “X Pro,” formerly known as TweetDeck, to anyone without a Blue subscription, as well as slowing down any links on the platform to Meta’s Instagram or Threads, as well as some news websites.