AFTER PUNISHING SUBSTACK [last April], NOW ALL LINKS. X has officially removed article headlines on links shared to the platform, now just displaying the image and website
Author was rapid steno-typing, scheduler, in Indonesia parliament. Must reach better engagement than conventional media, because very bad transparency of parliament in past.
We're in an information war and information is losing — because the only people who know we're in one are trying to kill it. Twitter/X has officially removed article headlines on links shared to the platform, now just displaying the image and website. Very weird, thought it was a bug at first rather than deliberately done. I look forward to Linda Yaccarino babbling about how amazing this is, in 3 days. According to Alex Heath from The Verge, highly recommend using Twitter for Mac on desktop. It’s essentially the service frozen in time, and for some reason still works. For example, headlines are still displayed on links.
A source at X/Twitter told to KYLIE ROBISON from FORTUNE MAGAZINE that staff really hate this update source added that it also makes very little sense because leadership wants users to stay on the app but this getting people to leave unintentionally (clicking link thinking its an image). Elon has internally said he wants to reduce the height of tweets, thus allowing more posts to fit within the portion of the timeline that appears on screen.
Once again I'm extremely sorry to be annoying, in principle it seems like Twitter and email newsletters should be a win-win, but it's shit like this why you should just subscribe to the newsletter directly, aside with million people already read of mine [substack].
This has to be a joke. Thoughts and prayers to every editorial social team currently in an emergency meeting to figure out to do about it. What's really funny about this, from a journalism standpoint, is that (if you ever see newsroom online-traffic reports) no one ever clicks through Twitter links to read the stories anyway. Everyone just comments on the headline. So, Elon Musk is only killing his own engagement.
Posting links to outside articles along with a comment drives a huge amount of traffic on this site. It only works if the link conveys some basic information about the piece. I think it's kind of hilarious that Musk, filled with angst about how buying the playground didn't buy him any friends, is now basically deciding that he'll just pave it all over and forget about it. If he's picked last, then screw it, no one plays any games on that sandlot.
Twitter has been an important distribution outlet for Substack authors, many of whom are independent of traditional media outlets and rely on subscriptions to make money.
Twitter is now so actively hostile to media and journalists - the group that made it successful - and yet, Threads is still not making the most of the open goal in front of them by embracing news.
Around August 21st by Kylie Robison from FORTUNE MAGAZINE, and then 9 September, less 1 month ago, by SEMAFOR, X/Twitter, is planning a major change in how news articles appear on the service, stripping out the headline and other text so that tweets with links display only an article’s lead image, according to material viewed by Fortune. Since late July, engagement on X posts linking to the New York Times has dropped dramatically. The drop in shares and other engagement on tweets with Times links is abrupt, and is not reflected in links to similar news organizations including CNN, the Washington Post, and the BBC, according to NewsWhip’s data on 300,000 influential users of X.
The drop in engagement in Times posts seems isolated to X: NewsWhip data showed that engagement with Times links shared on Facebook remained consistent relative to other outlets.
Some of Substack’s most popular writers have been vocal supporters of Mr. Musk, Matt Taibbi, who gave them special access to comb through and release the “Twitter Files,” internal communications that the billionaire said showed the biases of Twitter’s previous management.
On the other side, just one example, 3 days ago, prominent lawyer, George Thomas Conway III, very famous anti Trump and anti Elon, very high engagement in twitter / x [his tweet repeatedly hit 500k - 1 million engagement], announced he was trying to use substack.
While Twitter did not drive significant traffic to her newsletter, the restrictions penalized her readers who might want to share links to her work or discuss it on Twitter. Preventing Substack writers from including tweets in their newsletters also stripped proper credit from Twitter users. In cutting off access to Substack, Elon is banning access to free and highly informative content on the internet.
From around 5-6 April 2023, every link of substack gets throttled if anyone posts in twitter / X. No longer does a pop-up image appear in twitter / X if you uploaded a substack link in twitter / X.
April 4th, the newsletter service Substack announced that it had built a Twitter competitor. On April 6th, Twitter prevented Substack writers from sharing tweets in their newsletters. And on Friday, Twitter took steps to block Substack newsletters from circulating on the platform.
Twitter’s move to swat an upstart was an abrupt deviation from normal behavior among internet companies and publishers. It also provided more grist for critics who say that while Elon Musk, Twitter’s new owner, has often hailed the importance of free speech, he has not shied from restricting competitors and content that he doesn’t like.
The new fight with a young company is the latest controversy in Mr. Musk’s chaotic ownership of Twitter, which he acquired about six months ago. He has laid off more than 75 percent of its employees, has been sued by commercial landlords for failing to pay office rent and has lost advertisers.
While Mr. Musk has long clashed with mainstream news outlets, targeting Substack largely affects independent writers, some of whom depend on Twitter to drive readers to their work.
“This is a huge inconvenience,” said Hunter Harris, a writer who distributes her newsletter, Hung Up, on Substack. “It’s incredibly petty.”
Substack’s founders, Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi, said in a statement that they were “disappointed” by Twitter’s decision to stifle engagement with any tweets that featured a Substack link.
“Writers deserve the freedom to share links to Substack or anywhere else,” they said. “This abrupt change is a reminder of why writers deserve a model that puts them in charge, that rewards great work with money and that protects the free press and free speech.”
Substack’s founders, from left, Chris Best, Jairaj Sethi, and Hamish McKenzie, unveiled a Twitter-like service this week.
Credit = Lauren Segal for The New York Times
Twitter and Substack share a major investor, the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which could be called to play referee in the spat. A spokeswoman for Andreessen Horowitz, which led a US$65 million investment round in Substack in 2021 and invested $400 million in Mr. Musk’s Twitter last year, did not respond to a request for comment.
Substack’s new feature, called Notes, mimics Twitter in several ways. It allows users to post brief updates and lets other people like, repost or reply to them. The changes by Twitter on Friday meant that Twitter users could still share links to Substack newsletters, but blocked other users from liking or resharing those links.
Before Mr. Musk acquired it, Twitter sometimes restricted likes and retweets as a way to prevent content that violated its policies from spreading widely on the platform. The measure was used to limit the reach of former President Donald J. Trump’s tweets in which he made false assertions about how votes would be counted in the 2020 election.
Around 3-4 December 2022, just weeks after Elon bought Twitter, he tweeted that his desire to buy SUBSTACK, just hours after some news by THE VERGE that Substack must cut off around 10 percent of its entire staff. Since December 2022 - April 2023, maybe he was stuck, failed to buy SUBSTACK, so Elon punished SUBSTACK.
The end result is all news tweets /Xs looking like pop crave/pop base. Just tweet caption and image.
The best time for Elon Musk to roll out a new feature making it impossible to know what you're linking, is coincidence the abruptly no more funding for Ukraine because brouhaha in Capitol, house speaker ousted, etc.
There seems to be a media-source URL imposed over the pic.
It’s very funny to just ruin a big part of the user experience on here in a weird attempt to get people to not click links. They already don’t do that! But now they can’t discuss the story they didn’t read, and that is a core function of this website. t's because some VERY SMART PERSON decided to redefine the metrics of what the experience means to users and to advertisers. "Engagement" hides the reality that Twitter has been bleeding active users for over 11 months.
Why are the worst people to run a company or product or service are always the ones running it. The stupid is not an accident, the design is to do arson to the information space. One billionaire and his hostile foreign adversary backers have torched the entire disinformation fight and panel discussion industrial complex around it. It is by design for a destructive purpose.
This seems to be happening now on mobile [NOT ONLY DESKTOP OR LAPTOP], one day after Elon Musk tweeted that links don't get as much attention. Certainly one way to decrease attention to links is make it difficult/impossible to know what a link goes to.
[AGAIN] We're in an information war and information is losing — because the only people who know we're in one are trying to kill it. The last year of twitter is essentially just an experiment in taking a website that revolves around news/information and making it as hostile as possible to the people and organizations that do news gathering.
Sinister information war implications aside, this is just absurdly user hostile. Incredible stuff. The Substack kerfuffle is not the first time that Mr. Musk has blocked competing services from being shared on Twitter. In December, he suspended Twitter users, including several journalists, for linking to Mastodon after a Mastodon user shared public information about the location of Mr. Musk’s private jet.
He went on to bar users from sharing links to Facebook, Instagram and several other social media companies, but reversed course after a backlash. Under pressure from supporters who saw the move as an abandonment of his free speech principles, Mr. Musk said in December that he would step down as Twitter’s chief executive once he found a replacement. Mr. Musk has not yet done so.
Image
The venture firm co-founded by Marc Andreessen has made major investments in both Twitter and Substack.
Credit...
David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
Mr. Musk has also escalated his long-running feud with mainstream media.
The common theme among all of the affected websites and services is that they are ones for which “free speech absolutist” Elon Musk has a strong and vocal disdain. Musk is currently embroiled in a public war of words with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg about a potential cage fight between the two.
Among the affected websites and services are: Instagram, Facebook, Threads, Substack, the New York Times, and Bluesky. Twitter has implemented the throttling using its t.co link shortener, which is used to process all links posted to Twitter. When you click on a link to one of the affected websites, there’s a noticeable five-second delay before the actual website’s URL starts to load.
Twitter’s outbound link throttling was first spotted by a user on Hacker News
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