Elon Musk said that X, formerly Twitter, will start showing headlines in preview cards with URL’s on the platform again after removing titles last month, TechCrunch reported.
In a post on X, formerly Twitter, Musk said in an upcoming update, the company will overlay the title in the upper portion of the image of a URL Card. He didn’t mention any specific timeline for the rollout or give an example of what the card might look like.
According to TechCrunch, in August, the Tesla CEO said that X planned to stop showing titles with URL’s in “improved aesthetics.” The company stopped showing headlines in October after the announcement.
Because of this change, users had to tap on the URL card to actually know the title or read the headline. To get around this change, publishers started to write their own headlines on image and post the link separately or include the headline in the image of the generated preview card.
This change might make it easier for publications and not work on custom formats, but that completely depends on the layout of the new card.
Mashable reported that Twitter/X owner Elon Musk has announced the platform will reinstate headlines to link previews for articles. Musk removed automatic article headlines and their subhead text last month because he didn’t like how they looked.
The announcement came less than two hours after Musk himself inadvertently demonstrated how the removal of Twitter/X’s headline previews had severely reduced the platform’s functionality. Sharing a Reuters article about OpenAI, the beleaguered billionaire simply stated that it was “Extremely concerning!” – a statement rendered nonsensical without the link’s context.
According to Mashable, Twitter/X users immediately began roasting Musk for returning a feature many felt he never should have arbitrarily removed in the first place.
9to5Google reported that for years, Twitter/X has been a great source to not only witness breaking news (ie.the recent OpenAI drama), but also to get news from various outlets.
But when Elon Musk opted to remove headlines from link previews, it really took away the usefulness of sharing links on the platform. That is, on iOS and the web. Headlines were never removed from Twitter’s Android app.
Now, things are changing back. Elon Musk announced this week that Twitter/X will, “in an upcoming release,” put an “overlay title” on URL cards. In other words, tweets will start showing headlines again.
iPhoneInCanada reported that the original change to the headlines on X posed a number of issues for the user base. As one can imagine, cutting headlines caused a lot of context to be lost when sharing articles. Thus, many began having to clarify and write out the headlines as part of the post’s text.
It also became a cause for concern when the legitimacy of some articles and the spread of misinformation became apparent thanks to the change.
In my opinion, Mr. Musk tends to try out new things on X, formerly Twitter, without really thinking through how those changes will affect users. The removal of headlines from news articles is a vivid example of why he shouldn’t be messing around with things.