Twitter shares not displaying

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  saanajaakkola · Member · Dec 18, 2015 at 9:23 pm

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  Hi,
  I have had this problem for a few weeks now; the number of Twitter shares on blog posts is not displaying. I’ve always had this with Google+ but I am not that bothered by that. With Twitter it’s a bit different, and the number of shares has disappeared from all posts, not only new ones. It used to work still, let’s say 1-2 months back. I couldn’t find any recent discussions on this topic. Is anyone else having the same problem and is there anything I can do to fix this?

  Thanks in advance.

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  timethief · Member · Dec 18, 2015 at 9:41 pm

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  Twitter does not provide that information to wordpress.COM any longer. Read the Twitter blog post here: https://blog.twitter.com/2015/hard-decisions-for-a-sustainable-platform

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  saanajaakkola · Member · Dec 18, 2015 at 10:26 pm

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  Oh, this explains a lot!
  Thanks for information, I didn’t know this.

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  timethief · Member · Dec 18, 2015 at 10:40 pm

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  You are welcome. You can follow https://blog.twitter.com/

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  mannerofspeaking · Member · Dec 26, 2015 at 8:44 am

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  Yes, Twitter decided to remove share counts from its buttons. The reasoning is fairly convoluted – when they use words like “deprecation” to explain the decision, you know that they are trying to avoid telling it straight – but it strip it all away and it comes down to them trying to make more money by getting people to pay for the information.

  It’s Twitter’s platform and they have every right to change it as they see fit, especially given that the overwhelming majority of users (myself included) pay nothing to use it. Still, I think it a bad decision. According to some reports, there has been a decline in Twitter traffic since the announcement. For me, the share counts are not about ego; rather, they are social proof that can encourage more people to read and share the content. Think about it: you click on two posts; one has 79 Retweets and the other has no Retweets. Which one are you more likely to read and share?

  What can we do? On my blog, I have move the Tweet button to the end of my sharing row, after email (which also has no count). It looks less out of place there but it means that Twitter no longer occupies prime real estate on the sharing row.

  On a larger scale, if enough people on WordPress got their act together, we could all remove the Tweet buttons from our blogs for one week. That would have some impact on Twitter traffic but almost certainly would be picked up by the social media news, given the clout of WordPress.