Bookmarks vs likes on X: only one of them is actually silent.

X made likes private in June 2024 and a lot of people concluded that liking is now as discreet as bookmarking. It isn't. The change hid your likes from the crowd, not from the person who wrote the post.

The short version

• Like — hidden from other users since 12 June 2024. The author still gets a notification with your name, and the like still counts toward the post's public engagement.
• Bookmark — invisible to everyone including the author. No notification, no list, no trace. The author sees only an anonymous count on their own post.

So "private" means two different things depending on which button you press, and the difference matters in exactly the situations where you were being careful.

What actually changed in June 2024

Before that date, anyone could open your profile, click the Likes tab, and scroll everything you had ever liked. X removed that tab for everyone, framing it as a privacy improvement, and the practical effect was real: your likes stopped being a browsable public record.

What did not change is the notification. Like someone's post and it lands in their notifications with your handle attached, exactly as before. If your concern was the author knowing, the update did nothing for you.

When the difference bites

These are the ordinary cases where people get caught out.

• A competitor's launch post. Bookmarking it is research. Liking it tells them you were watching.
• A job posting while you are employed. The author is often the hiring manager, and sometimes someone who knows your employer.
• A post you disagree with and want to reference later. A like reads as endorsement to the author and feeds the post's reach; a bookmark does neither.
• Anything you are saving to read, not to signal. Most saves are this, and the like button is the wrong tool for it.

Likes are not storage

There's a second problem with using likes as a save button, separate from privacy. The Likes list is a long reverse-chronological feed with no folders and, unlike Bookmarks, no search field. Bookmarks at least got a search bar in late 2024. If you have been treating likes as a reading list, you have been putting things somewhere strictly harder to get them back out of.

Both lists share the same underlying fragility: they point at live posts. Delete the post, suspend the account, go protected, and the entry stops rendering in either place. Neither is a copy — that's why saves vanish.

Use bookmarks to keep, likes to say something

The clean rule: like when you want the author to know, bookmark when you want the post. They are not redundant buttons, and treating them as interchangeable is how people end up with a public-facing engagement history and no usable archive.

If the keeping half is what you actually care about, the missing piece is a copy you control. Zihin syncs your X bookmarks into your own library through your own logged-in browser session — searchable by meaning rather than exact wording, auto-tagged, and still there after the original post is deleted. Your LinkedIn saved posts land in the same place. Nothing is published, and nothing is sent to X.

Continue reading

• Can people see your bookmarks on X? — the privacy question on its own.
• How to search your X bookmarks — the search bar, and what it misses.
• X bookmarks disappeared? — every real cause.
• X bookmark folders — organizing, and the Premium wall.
• Is there a limit on X bookmarks? — where the list stops loading.

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