Great, tweets are showing another metric now

First, we got the view counter. Now, iOS users can see how many people have bookmarked a tweet.

Twitter is adding yet another public metric to measure posts by. There’s now a counter for how many bookmarks a tweet has gotten that lives beside the retweet, quote retweet, and like numbers. The counter is currently only showing up for iOS users who visit the tweet details page, but a help document says there are “plans to expand.”

Unlike other metrics, you can’t tap the bookmarks counter to see who’s added it to their list. According to the Twitter Support account, “bookmarks are still private” and the company will “never display which accounts have added a Tweet to their Bookmarks.”

It’s hard to imagine that many people want to know how many bookmarks a tweet has gotten, with one notable exception. Twitter CEO Elon Musk has tweeted about bookmarking a surprising amount, at one point calling it a “de facto silent like,” and he also said the ability to bookmark a tweet from its details page was a “major Twitter improvement.” It sounds like he’ll love this feature (unless it reveals that not enough people are bookmarking his tweets), but I think most users will think of it as another thing cluttering up the Twitter interface with information that’s not particularly useful, just like the view counter.