(Gizmodo) Twitter owner Elon Musk seems to think his site would look a lot better without any helpful, descriptive headlines that describe users’ posted links. This is also the man who still thinks that dull “X” logo represents his new brand, so that’s not saying much about Musk’s overall aesthetic taste.
Late on Monday, Fortune reported that Twitter—the site that keeps claiming it’s now called “X”—would remove headlines and description text from links posted to the app. Instead, each link would simply display the main image from the site without any other context on the URL. Musk then confirmed his plans to kill headlines in an early Tuesday morning tweet, claiming the move would “greatly improve the esthetics.”
This is coming from me directly. Will greatly improve the esthetics.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 22, 2023
According to Fortune’s unnamed sources, the company wants to make tweets smaller so it can stick more content on a single feed page. Somehow, Musk also thinks this move would reduce clickbait. Currently, each shared article is included in a so-called “card” that provides a headline and a short description of the content. Cards don’t count as characters in the tweet format, and the cards have long been used by creators to provide context on the link without eating up that 280-character limit.
The move would force users to manually input the headline and description text in each tweet, a task that can be handled with a bot for websites that regularly tweet out every new article. For other users, it would require them to spend even more precious time, energy, and characters describing every single link they post. In such a future, Twitter users would be disincentivized from linking to outside sources altogether.
Twitter’s CEO Linda Yaccarino mentioned as much in a recent interview. She said that the plan for the platform is for users to subscribe to their favorite creators producing “video and articles” while making a “real living” from Musk’s affiliate scheme. Musk has also touted his platform as a means for publishing news content, and he tried to advertise his product to reporters desiring “more freedom to write and a higher income.”
