If links to online articles are shared on X, they receive a preview with a title and some text. That should probably change. If you want more, you can pay.
According to a report, the short message service X (formerly Twitter) is working on making links to online articles much less prominent in the future. The US magazine Fortune writes, citing an anonymous source. Accordingly, the link preview should only consist of the article image, all text – including the title – would disappear. The change is therefore directly based on a request by the company boss Elon Musk and could be used, among other things, to urge media organizations to take out a paid subscription. This increases the character limit, which leaves room for more context in the post itself.
The link preview on Twitter dates back to a time when the character limit for tweets was 140 characters. While there have been 280 since 2017 , the preview has continued to provide a way to add more text and context to a tweet. However, this only applies to the desktop version, in the apps the preview only includes the domain and the title of the shared article. If users and media are pushed to put more text in the posts by removing the texts in the preview, this would make them even longer. This contradicts Musk’s stated goal of putting more posts in the timeline.
“Most product decisions are made based on something he wants or likes,” Fortune quoted the anonymous source as referring to Musk. He only wrote on the platform on Monday that journalists who “want more freedom in writing and a higher income” should upload content directly to X. With the pruning of the preview, which the report says is already being tested internally, his service could also create a further incentive for this. Only last week it became known that X had delayed calls to various media and social networks by seconds via the in-house URL shortener t.co for days . Media that Musk had previously attacked and competing services were affected.
Meanwhile, X says it fixed a bug that caused links and images to disappear from tweets posted on the platform before December 2014 over the weekend. This was announced by the platform’s support account and announced that the affected content should reappear in the coming days: “No images or data have been lost.” One of the network’s most shared posts, which US actress Ellen DeGeneres posted in 2014 during an Oscar ceremony, was also affected. It ‘s already complete again.
