This affects the Twitter social media card of type summary_large_image - a short-term fix if this affects your site is to switch that for the summary card, which still shows a visible link title with a smaller, square cropped image. https://twitter.com/matteason/status/1709986442124951931
> "Our algorithm tries to optimize time spent on X, so links don't get as much attention, because there is less time spent if people click away," the billionaire said.
... at that point he might as well say "maximize" instead of "optimize"
I don’t understand this move at all. “There is less time spent if people click away”
So now people are forced to click every link if they want to see what it’s about? Can’t stay on Twitter and get the headline and lead-in?
I would think these link previews let people stay on twitter but what do I know. I’ve stopped using it a long time ago. The mastodon app I use has link previews so this won’t affect me much.
Musk's argument is that not showing any of the content other than the image will force people to instead put the article text content in the Twitter post itself, next to the image. By showing almost no context for a link, it will force posters to manually include more context, and thus people will stay on Twitter longer than when they were generating a bit of context for the embeds (e.g. article title).
Have they de-discovered a/b testing? Presumably it would have told them whether users stay or go because they have to click the link to find out what it is.
Yeah, but for some reason journalists think X is still worth it, even though it goes against everything they stand for. X is not Twitter, yet journos can’t kick the habit.
I certainly hope so -- because it's getting old to have to post the link AND copy the headline in manually. Though I got used to it posting RT links anyway, as they already weren't doing link previews for those.
What are the consequences for people using screen readers?
Are the article details still accessible to those users or do they have go entirely by the tweet text?
I thought this might have been linked to policies requiring social media platforms to pay for deriving content off newspapers, such as embed text, but alas improve their look it is.
I don't think the driving force of this change is either aesthetics or gov't policy. I think Musk is trying to maximizing Twitter's time on site and if you remove the headlines (and add 5 second delays on link redirects), it decreases the click-through rate on the links. Musk knows that if he outlaws all non-paid links, it would result in an uproar from media companies and users, so he is making the experience as bad as possible so people choose to stop linking out on their own.
If twitter really wants to "boost engagement" I'd suggest maybe not forcing people to log in or have JS enabled, but maybe that's just me. I haven't viewed anything on the platform itself since they made those changes.
For 99% of users, they don't even know what Javascript is, let alone that you can disable it, let alone that they _should_ disable it on any site.
Not saying if that's a good thing or not, but I doubt allowing JS to be disabled would have any real effect on their engagement. In fact, I'm sure the frontend team at X would argue all the visual stuff enabled by JS increases engagement.
I think the “the masses” implies there are actually a lot of people still reading Twitter… perhaps it's just my bubble, but I feel not many actual humans are impacted by this change.
Use of that phrase tends to either signal that the author thinks that their little bubble is larger than it really is or that they have some sort of paternalistic need to inform this not-me-but-most-everyone-else group of people (or be concerned on their behalf). Or both.
Alternatively non-Brits may need to recognize that they aren't the primary target audience of British media and it's not a problem if they misunderstand something.
Think of it as just another retweet(?) (re-X (?)) by Musk as he scans through his feed looking for things to boost - it's not a professional graphic, just a bit of fanboy material.
If you want to be really disturbed .. follow the source and see if you can spot any tell tale signs of just how rabid a fan that particular fan might be.
Less a Musk fan work, more a devoted offering from a Musk Acolyte willing to die at the altar of Elon.
"Who wouldn't want Elon Musk by their side, leading product?" - Linda
Thankfully no one will possibly consider just putting the titles inside the images in 48pt font with eye-bursting colors and no way to respond to user/device-specific configuration, right?
I don't understand what you are saying. Isn't it common on internet sites to allow the user to create the headline for the link? Is this what you mean? They just made their own title for it? Or is there some way to make it look like the official headline?
A tweet with a fake headline now looks exactly the same as a real headline. Previously the headline was pulled directly from the link so it was much harder to make a realistic fake
The official headline is no longer displayed - search for "Elon Musk wants to get rid of this headline" for examples of people linking to an article which reported on this in August.
I deleted my account that I opened in 2007. I was a heavy user and used it to make friends and get jobs. I'm a little sad to see it thrown away like this, but not so much that I wanted to stick around to support it.
I don't get it. I just don't. People use to claim that Musk bought Twitter just to burn it down, but even he doesn't have $43B to light on fire. (An open aside to readers: please don't reply about tax write-offs unless you actually understand how they work.) Does he genuinely, sincerely think things like this will work out well in the long run?
He commited to buying it then tried to back out with a bunch of false excuses (later admitted in BBC interview). The market had a big drop + the reality of the Apple advertising attribution changes kept hitting. Meta was able to recover from Apple's ad changes decently, turning Twitter into 8chan didn't help their recovery.
I feel like people tie themselves in knots to avoid the obvious conclusion; that he’s in _way_ over his head, and the whole thing is driven by a dangerous combo of incompetence and overconfidence.
I’m not totally sure why this is, and it seems to mostly be just a Musk thing; when Yahoo periodically wakes from its slumber to make the Yahoo Finance UI inexplicably worse or whatever, say, no-one attributes that to any evil plot; it’s just Yahoo continuing to be rather bad at running Yahoo.
I suppose that some people still think of him as a magical supergenius, but even ignoring the Twitter product fuckups, that’s just really hard to sustain these days.
I actually don’t doubt Musk’s sincerity. He’s always been an opinionated user of the platform. I still think he’s under the impression he bought a technology company, not a media company, and has stopped listening to contrary opinions.
If he thought he was buying a technology company, why did he spend so much time insisting the tech stack was garbage and the engineering staff incompetent? Aside from those, what other reason is there to buy a tech company?
He never intended to buy the company, it was just a poorly executed excuse for a TSLA stock sale that got out of hand. There was never a reason to buy Twitter.
But once he had it, he’s been concentrating on the technical stack as if that was the biggest problem. Musk spent so much time there because he’s bad at this and focuses on the wrong things, because those are the things he’s good at. I think he is a really good engineering CEO but Twitter’s problems are 90% social.
This is an unpopular opinion, but I think Hacker News would be a worse experience with link previews.
One of the best things about this site, ui-wise, is that it feels "focused".
The focus is not on the links posted but on the text surrounding them, if you want to give a preview for what your link is talking about, you just explain it.
It also encourages less lazy discussion, because the title and pictures don't jump through the link into the current context.
It might not be a bad thing for X in the same way it works well here.
But they've done the opposite, dropped the headline and just kept the picture. When you can only advertise your content through the picture, you get YouTube thumbnails, not HN.
And yet, we are talking about X. Which currently shows a cover photo and nothing else about a link, so you have no idea what the link / article / page is about.
Many people share links with commentary and without clicking on an article you would have no idea other than a photo, about what the commentary is referring to.
While my exposure to Xitter is limited to Xits that others post and very occasionally reading an associated thread I think there's *some* merit here.
URLs can be bulky and making them short has it's merits. However, it also reduces the information--what they are seeing as "engagement" is often going to be people clicking it, seeing it's garbage and closing it. Thus I would favor a middle ground: Short visible URLs but the whole thing is displayed if you hover over it. I have no good answer for mobile.
I have a pattern for producing screenshots of my pages for use in social media cards which is suddenly a lot more relevant: https://til.simonwillison.net/shot-scraper/social-media-card...