For anyone who posts links to X, it’s been intuitively clear that since Elon Musk took over, posts with links don’t get the same reach as they used to.
On old Twitter, a tweet with a link to a news article would often go viral or get a lot of engagement. Now, with the new “For you” algorithm that prioritizes images and videos, posts with links go almost unnoticed.
Finally, we now have some confirmation. Over the weekend, Elon Musk responded to Paul Graham, a Y-Combinator founder, about the topic:
Just write a description in the main post and put the link in the reply. This just stops lazy linking.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 24, 2024
What Musk describes — putting the link in a reply instead of in the main tweet — is what savvy posters have already been doing.
You’ve probably seen a variety of workarounds on X lately from people who often post links to articles, such as posting a screenshot of the headline or a multi-tweet thread.
As you have probably noticed, all of these options are kind of annoying for readers. I can confirm that they’re also very annoying for the person posting the article.
(I should note that one of the features of the paid version of X is a “Top Articles” feature where you can see the articles your friends are posting.)
Initially, it seemed (to me) that the downranking of link posts was partly because of the new emphasis on video on X, and partly about a desire to keep people from leaving X to go anywhere else (in various posts, links to other social platforms have faced some version of a shadowban).
Musk says this is meant to stop “lazy linking” — which … I’m not sure exactly what that is. The term isn’t common social media slang like “dirty delete,” “subtweeting,” or “soft block.” (The term is sometimes used in computer programming.) X didn’t respond to questions about lazy linking.
Graham’s response was to ask Musk what was so lazy about putting a link in the main tweet instead of following it up with a reply that contains a link. Musk, so far, has not responded.
If I write a new essay and tweet a link to it, that’s “lazy linking,” but if I tweet that I’ve written a new essay and then put the link in a reply, that’s somehow better?
— Paul Graham (@paulg) November 24, 2024
The overall effect here is that X is no longer useful for finding links to interesting articles to read — something that Twitter used to be fantastic at. Bummer!
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