A few years back we worked so hard to get that little bubble next to the social media outlet icon on our sites so we could have some proof that a piece of content was deemed valuable by a social community and now Twitter has removed it!

As the Web Designer Depot reported Twitter has finally implemented this planned change and blocked the counters from getting share data on external websites without a subscription to GNIP (their data service). Social proof has worked psychologically for many over the last few years and leaves us wondering if other social media channels will follow suit?

The silver lining is that the counters are a bit misleading and are short on context as they do not include retweets and other types of interaction with the content. Also, as reported by Search Engine Watch here these share buttons are not used very frequently.

Check out this articles source: Twitter kills-off social proof