Twitter remains in the constant spiral of tests, changes and innovations that it has become in recent months. Unfortunately, we have already seen many cases where the tests showed so little a priori analysis that they ended up being a headache (and if not, tell all the people and companies who saw their identity impersonated when the social network started automatically granting verification for all Twitter Blue accounts).

The latest change we have seen is that now Twitter displays the total number of views for each message sent, information that we could previously see for our own tweets (labeled “views”), along with data about user interactions with them, but which has now become visible to everyone. Yes, if you go to Twitter (if you haven’t already) and start scrolling through the timeline, you’ll see that there is now a bar graph icon below it, and to the right of it the total number of views (which have now been renamed “plays”).

I mentioned at the beginning that during these months Twitter has made several mistakes, but in this case, and although everything has its nuances, I think that we are in for a great success on the part of the social network, because it is taking a step forward in what is called transparency . Lying is unfortunately quite common on the internet, as is drawing skewed conclusions based on data that alone is not sufficient to produce the desired results.

Of course, given the nature of Twitter, we could already read responses for all tastes when it comes to this new public metric. Most, as almost always on Spanish-speaking Twitter, jokes of one kind or another, such as those that confirm, given the difference in opinion on “I like you” and retweets, stating that their followers are somewhat “catchy” (stingy) . , but also those who see in this difference a correction to the quite common interpretation that an account with many followers and few interactions accumulates many bots in its follower list.

Thanks to a former Twitter employee, we were also able to learn that the social network had been working on a similar feature a few years ago. At that time, the social network intended to offer users a signal that their messages do not go directly “into the void”, that despite low interactions, there are people who read what they publish. However, after a trial period, they discovered that «most people didn’t get any views and we had to have certain thresholds before we showed it because “0 views” was depressing«