Elon Musk has confirmed that, if you put a link in a Twitter post, the post will be throttled. In other words, it is a negative for his algorithm.
Twitter, of course, has had numerous problems since Musk bought it and tried to re-brand it as X. Among those problems was the destruction of its moderation system that held trolls, scammers, harassers and bigots at somewhat at bay. And an algorithm that pushes Musk’s own views on people, in order to make himself the center of attention.
But throttling tweets that include a link is a different kind of problem, and one that goes back to the essence of the web — providing links to outside sources.
When the model user interface came into being, some folks were terrified of outbound links, under the theory that you don’t want to send people away from your own site.
(Some still are. Many publications, for example, will write about a lawsuit but fail to provide a link to the legal filing being discussed.)
But Google rose to great fame (and fortune) by sending people away from its site. It was the very meat of its original business model, to simply give people the bit of information that they sought. And as result it became a trusted (back in the day) website for people to return to and it became the world’s leading site for search.
Bloggers followed suit. We understood that if you provided outbound links to other sites that had interesting information, the reader would trust your site as a value. And return.
Indeed, when I started blogging I did weekly round-ups of personal injury blogs, and hi-lighted what others were writing. Goodbye, adios, and come back soon was the way I thought about it.
And bloggers, for the most part, continue to do just that. See, for example, almost any post on Scott Greenfield’s Simple Justice, Kevin Underhill’s Lowering the Bar, or Michael Dorf’s Dorf on Law. This remains true for any half-decent blog you can find, and there are many.
But Musk is doing the opposite, trying to stop people from posting links by telling folks he will throttle their posts. He is terrified of people leaving and wants to build a walled garden.
So be it. And, perhaps, this is yet another reason that Twitter users will continue to flee. Why, for example, would I bother to post a link to this post on Twitter when I know its algorithm will throttle it?
Bluesky is now exploding popularity, as racing to get more servers to help it along. It will no doubt continue to do so as long as Musk keeps doing his thing.
Unlike Twitter, Bluesky gives tremendous moderation tools to the user. And unlike Facebook’s Threads app, Bluesky doesn’t try to force feed you content that it wants you to get (resulting in tons of garbage posts in your feed, wherein folks desperately farm for engagement by asking dumb questions).
If Musk’s intent was to kill Twitter, he’s continuing to do an excellent job of it.