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The end of tweeted articles
- jseliger 3y agoI (used to) use Twitter to find interesting things to read and save to Instapaper, but, because of the recent turn down in link virality, Twitter is considerably worse for that. Substack Notes is better for it, but I can't tell if Substack applies a hit to links from other sources (Wordpress, whatever).
- m3kw9 3y agoX is trying to move content from outside to inside, hence deprioritized link posts, increasing the word limit 100x and sharing revenue. The sharing revenue is 2 fold, one is to give X content creators higher priority and 2 to incentivize content to be created on X.
- pests 3y agoThe rev share has been inconsistent and unreliable though.
- joewferrara 3y agoThis article is a lot of words about the fact that twitter, or should I say X, is promoting tweets, er posts, that keep one on X (posts without a link in them, the example given in the article is posts with pictures) instead posts that send one away from X (posts that consist of a link promoting something on an external website, which used to have the ability to go viral greatly helping the owner/author of what's on the external website).
- beepbooptheory 3y agoThe article is roughly 1,500 words.. If that is a lot to you, I guess it just means you probably like twitter these days!
- earthboundkid 3y agoI dunno, I also found it sort of rambling and not getting to the point of its thesis.
- latency-guy2 3y agoThe article also agrees that 1,500 words is a lot, seeing as they are the leeches who say things like optimize for the picture rather than the content and the attention economy. Really, this is a bunch of whinging from people who used to get free promotion from others work, now they can't abuse that trust anymore.
- golergka 3y agoAs a user, I'd much prefer a concise tweet instead of a huge article with the same exact point. So, I guess Musk's Twitter actually improves my experience.
- thih9 3y agoWhat if it’s impossible to present that point in a post on X? E.g. because it’s too complex, or because the author doesn’t post on X, or for some other reason.
- SamBam 3y agoSome people just want to live in a world of sound-bites and hot-takes. They're also the sorts of people who believe most books should be replaced by a paragraph-long summary.
- madeofpalk 3y agoUnfortunately now you can pay to have your tweets be huge-article sized.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- carlossouza 3y ago> If your goal is visibility, you are well advised to tailor your messaging to the medium. That means skewing to the visual and away from the linked article. Isn't that obvious?
- Given_47 3y agoYea I like Strauss but this was a bit strange. He doesn’t seem to understand the profile and iq of the average Twitter user and the type that drives “virality.” Additionally one can immediately engage with an image (which is why every stupid engagement optimizing account would tweet with images), reading an external piece takes more work
- PaulHoule 3y agoOne of those filters I want to apply to Mastodon is “images with text”, that is, it is frequently a screenshot of an X (yuck!) or some inflammatory message that I won’t repeat. People do click on them though which is what makes them so annoying.
- Given_47 3y agoHaha, there’s that meme about five websites or so that r just screenshots of the other websites. And yea it enables those stupid posts so I try to refrain from engaging
- raydev 3y ago> He doesn’t seem to understand the profile and iq of the average Twitter user and the type that drives “virality.” There was still an enormous (and arguably self-sustaining) population of "readers".
- hyperpape 3y agoNo, because it wasn't always true for Twitter. Twitter made a choice to change how it rewarded pictures vs. links, and it happened surprisingly late.
- christiangenco 3y agoThe game of any platform is to attract and keep more attention on the platform. More advanced platforms will be better at this than less developed platforms. Content that causes users to leave your platform is, from the perspective of the platform, worse content than content that keeps users engaged in your platform. Articles on X don't go viral as much as they used to on Twitter? That certainly makes conceptual sense because consuming an article involves leaving the platform. If you'd like that same content to perform better on X then "tailor your messaging to the medium" by breaking up the ideas from the article into a series of tweets. That's the game. If you don't like it then play a different game.
- earthboundkid 3y agoIt used to be that the selling prop for a lot of sites was "we'll send you away, but you'll come back every day because we always have a variety of interesting places to send you." In the early days of blogs, The Atlantic would link to other sites, for example, and the Verge is doing it now with their new HP. As social media took over, homepages died, so it didn't make sense to link to a post at blog B from your blog A because no one reads your blog A anymore, they just see some of your Tweets. At this point, the social media giants have changed their algorithms to try to retain more engagement and compete with Tik Tok (which never sends users off platform), but I think in the long run they will fail because there will always be more interesting stuff somewhere else than on your site.
- Retric 3y agoGetting people to play the platforms game is why they end up paying content creators. Twitter recently started paying people per message specifically because they don’t want all monetization to happen off platform.
- raydev 3y agoPre-Elon Twitter was arguably the last major social media site that actually supported some subset of the "open web" people like to reminisce about here. Articles had the possibility of going viral because the old Twitter didn't downrank external links so heavily, and even encouraged it with the ability to view all quote tweets (another feature X just disabled). And now it's gone. I think it's fine to mourn that.
- moomin 3y agoThe way I see it, Twitter was one of the last sites standing in the content curation game. Reddit’s great, but balkanised. HN itself is pretty good and broader but Twitter was the best product I used for kicking up stuff from around the web I might actually find worthwhile reading. Now it’s lost that function. Was it a good business decision? No idea. But it’s made the product worse from this consumer’s perspective.
- whimsicalism 3y agoWe're all on goodreads
- djbusby 3y agoThere's been some recent fuzz on HN about Goodreads too. Is it September over there too?
- afandian 3y agoHas been for what seems like forever.
- Tao3300 3y agoIt's like the fall of Rome. Historians will debate, when did it really start? When did it finally fall? Did it ever fall at all? It always has been September, always will be, and never was at all; everywhere and nowhere.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- afandian 3y agoWalking is just controlled falling.
- stronglikedan 3y ago
- CamelCaseName 3y agoYou have to wonder what comes next. The act of killing virality for long form content leads to a reduction in its production. Then what? Do the deep and important, but not world shattering, stories stop being told?
- munificent 3y agoThere was plenty of "long form content" being produced for hundreds of years before the invention of social media. We called them books. I think long form content will be fine.
- bjt 3y agoBooks are one example on the spectrum of types of content here. They're not enough on their own. A book is a poor source for an in-depth look at pending legislation, for example. Essays, short stories, deep investigative news stories, etc. also all fall into the "long form" bucket. A lot of those had their natural homes in magazines and newspapers, and those have taken huge hits as people's attention has turned to short, viral, online things instead.
- avrionov 3y agoEvery website looks like TikTok now.
- ploum 3y ago[flagged]
- m3kw9 3y agoIt’s simple, links are deprioritized in the main home feed, which suggests the home feed is where things go viral now. It’s where Elon gets control, but you should be able to know from the open source algorithm how it is deprioritized
- pests 3y agowas the algorithm ever released or just the scale analytics code?
- photochemsyn 3y agoTLDR: social media shops are increasingly following the walled garden strategy. From an information searching viewpoint, this is fairly negative as search engines may eventually lose the ability to index the content in these walled gardens - and for some reason(control of what users get to see?), the in-house search capabilities of social media sites tend to be really terrible, see the whole Reddit API fiasco for example that eliminated all the good independent search tools for that site. As far as X / Substack: > "Substack this year and last directly targeted Twitter with launches of both a short-form Notes that looked a lot like Twitter as well as a chat feature that moved conversations off social media to its own platform. In response, Twitter stopped allowing users to retweet, like, or reply to tweets with Substack links. It makes sense that Twitter would now take on Substack with a long-form content distribution feature of its own..." https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/18/twitter-to-support-long-form-articles-with-mixed-media-elon-musk-confirms/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/18/twitter-to-support-long-fo...
- m0llusk 3y agoTwitter addicts are strange. The attention economy is important, but it is also broadly fractured. Getting loads of clicks all of a sudden never really meant that much.
- igor47 3y agoYeah the article has the line: > The attention economy is the real economy Which is exactly what I would expect a journalist to say... someone addicted to the loads of clicks. Maybe it matters more if getting loads of clicks is your job? Maybe it really is real power? I feel both skeptical and fomo.
- croisillon 3y agoI have been a twitter addict since months before i finally subscribed, back in 2013. From time to time I would try to stop but never longer than a few days. Now I went cold turkey with Musk takeover and I don't really miss it at all. Humans are strange.
- fmajid 3y agoTwitter is at best the 15th largest social network, smaller than Quora or Pinterest. Yet because somehow it appeals to the narcissists in the media and celebrities, it gets treated as way more important than it actually deserves to be. I can't wait for Elon Musk to finish running it fully into the ground. Same story as with Hollywood, which as an industry used to generate in an entire year only as much money as 2 weeks of the telco's SMS revenues alone. But Hollywood executives are sharks highly adept at getting much more significant tech executives, with stardust envy, to overpay for their marginal businesses.
- jachee 3y agoThe article seems to miss (or perhaps ignore?) the fact that there has been an incredibly massive exodus from formerly-twitter. There just literally aren’t as many people around to see/share things, which is also a contributing factor to not going viral.
- Invictus0 3y agoCitation needed
- Tao3300 3y agoYou only need to look up.
- jachee 3y agohttps://i.imgur.com/gqmwQmP.jpg https://i.imgur.com/gqmwQmP.jpg That’s pretty indicative. The blue bird app was always in the top 3.
- Invictus0 3y agoTo me that is only indicative of growth, not decline. People are downloading the app in high numbers. Comparing the downloads of the app across time relative to other apps is unscientific.
- throw14092023 3y ago[flagged]
- kibwen 3y ago> I'm not really invested in this debate beause I honestly don't care The irony of caring so much that one goes to the trouble of registering a brand-new HN account solely to tell people how little they care?
- throw14092023 3y ago
- nikodunk 3y agoWhat an excellent, well thought out piece of writing!! Wonderful. I’m glad I found it on hacker news, and will now repost it onto mastodon. The rest of the social world be damned.
- Tao3300 3y agoHmm... virality isn't dying, the idea of measuring it from a single, centralized authority like Twitter is.
- guestbest 3y agoMySpace and Facebook used to make users enter CAPTCHAs in order to allow them to follow a link and leaves the site with warning banners anyway, so it is part of a social network’s DNA to keep users onsite
- harles 3y agoDon’t forget about integrated browsers in apps. Gmail, Facebook, and I’m sure a million other apps do this so even when you leave, you’re still in their app.
- MisterBastahrd 3y agoTwitter will not even allow you to unsubscribe from their emails anymore unless you log into their platform. I'm not sure of the details, but isn't that a violation of the CAN-SPAM act?
- eggbrain 3y agoOutside of the fact that a platform will always selfishly want to prioritize its own content and keep users on its platform, I feel there is a growing sentiment from web users as well that most content-based websites are just _bad_, and platforms are adapting to this behavior. Over the past few years, how many times have you: - Searched Google for something like "Best Coffee Maker" / "STORE coupon codes" / "Best cocktail recipie" and the article was just an SEO'd affiliate link blogspam? - Searched Twitter for something innocuous only for the top links to be some sort of crypto or OnlyFans garbage? - Clicked into a website just for 1-3 visual modals to popup to "Disable your Adblock" / "Sign up for our mailing list" / "Login to view the rest of the post" (And we thought popups were dead once popup blockers became a thing) This article is even an example -- I scroll down just to be interrupted by a call to action modal requesting my email and making me find the "continue reading" button just to read the content. Platforms provide content consistency -- once users understand the platform, they can know how to consume content on it. It's perhaps the death of the open web, but I kind of get it.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Given_47 3y ago> This article is even an example -- I scroll down just to be interrupted by a call to action modal requesting my email and making me find the "continue reading" button just to read the content. That substack popup drove me insane until I had enough and just turned js off for them. Very pleasant now
- f33d5173 3y agoIts hardly surprising that an image would get more engagement than would an article. While an image has less meat to it, by the same token it requires less effort to engage with it. You look at the image, think for a second, then possibly retweet or like. With an article, you can hardly engage with it without following a link, reading some number of paragraphs, reflecting on them, etc. I would consider it quite natural that images and articles get roughly corresponding amounts of engagement. That this was the absolute level of analysis was quite disapointing. Besides trying to evaluate in more depth the viral capability of links today, I would have expected a comparison with days past. I can hardly, having read this article, confidently say that elon is trying to kill external links.
- Dalewyn 3y agoIsn't Mysterious Twitter X curbing "virality" of mainstream media propaganda a good thing?