Elon Musk has fulfilled his promise: Eliminate news headlines on X. Twitter, as we all know it, is falling further and further behind. Our final move was to wipe the headlines off the map, leaving only the photograph and the message we decided to accompany it.

In some cases, like in the Xataka example, we always write the title directly. But when someone shares a random piece of news, we will no longer be able to see a snapshot of the headline they are referring to. We will have to click on that image to discover the news.

Reducing news to just visuals. The reason X gives is that it helps “reduce the loudness of tweets.” For the sake of simplicity, the social network decided to remove the cards and leave only images with a small pop-up with the name of the website in the bottom left corner. There is nothing in the URL or title of the news.

Another of the arguments put forward is that we can fight against ‘clickbait’ in this way, although it seems counterproductive as we still have much less information with this new method. Previously there was a message, a photo and a title, now only the first two remain.

Less narrative opportunities. If the title had been read, a different message could have been written. This gave more playing field when composing messages. There are now two options. You either manually copy the same news headline or choose to comment directly in the broadcast and force the other person to click on the news.

With the new look we can no longer read the Genbeta title (‘Twitter is removing titles from link preview’)

You can no longer learn everything at a glance. One of the advantages of old Twitter is that you can swipe and get a good look at everything going on. From learning other people’s opinions from their messages, seeing their photos and reading their news headlines. A unique tool for being informed in a short time.

And this is becoming increasingly difficult with the new X, which makes many changes to the visibility of tweets in the quest to please advertisers.

The money is in clicks. “If you are a journalist who wants more writing freedom and higher income, publish directly on this platform!” warned Musk himself. It’s either having to type directly or click on images that don’t have a title.

The x measure is to try to get more users to click on images to see the full photo. But for the media, this leads them to a compromise. They either write the same title in the tweet (to make it easier to inform), or they accept Musk’s suggested game and put the relevant messages (forcing the user to click if he wants to get information).

To continue sharing the news as before, the media must copy the headline from the message.

X has not improved compared to Twitter. Apart from the community notes, which add an admirable extra layer of information, the truth is that a year after Musk bought Twitter, the social network has not improved significantly. On the contrary, it offers less information and bots are more in control.

And there isn’t much room for maneuver. Not for the users, because Mastodon isn’t done coming together yet, nor for X, whose value has fallen by up to 90%. The platform’s revenue has plummeted, and this move to hide the headlines appears to be nothing more than an almost desperate strategy to attract them.

in Xataka | X has become a two-headed Hydra (and neither can save him from economic disaster)