The X drama continues as Elon Musk continues to introduce changes to the platform that he believes will improve it. There’s nothing new about making changes, it’s done all the time when a new owner takes over a business. One of Musk’s latest ideas caught our attention due to the potential impact it would have on us as a news outlet. Musk may be removing headlines from shared news articles on X.
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
Remove the headlines is an effort to improve aesthetics, in Musk’s view, and reduce the amount of vertical space taken up by a post. Currently, X displays shared news links with the publication’s featured image, a snippet, and the headlines.
The new method would remove everything and leave only the featured image and an overlay of the URL. According to Fortune, via Engadget, “It also says that the change going to happen even though X ran it by advertisers who didn’t like it.” Musk also seems to think that removing headlines will reduce clickbait, though an argument could be made that images can be clickbait too, but I digress.
NEWS: X is changing how news links show up on the timeline.
— X News Daily (@xDaily) August 22, 2023
It will strip out the headline/text so links display only an article’s lead image. pic.twitter.com/yseGs58i3Z
The removal of headlines is not surprising to me. Musk has already mentioned he wants to make X the one-stop app for social, shopping, and even payments. He would like to keep users on the platform and not clicking away to websites like ours. He has encouraged content creators to use the long form posting on X rather than dropping links to their websites or videos.
The idea has not been implemented yet, but it sounds like Musk is going to proceed, even with many vocal disagreements. So we shall see how this works out for X and content creators. It’s a big ask for publications like ours as we have spent ten years creating this website and the content on it, and it’s ours, not X’s. I wonder if people truly want only one platform to go to for everything, it remains to be seen.
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