It has been a wild year for X, formerly known as Twitter, due to the implemented changes. Some are good while others are preferably reversed. It appears that X has finally realized that removing headlines for URLs serves no purpose as the company returns to the old format.
Article Links Now Include Headlines
Elon Musk believed that links looked better for the site without the automatic inclusion of article headlines, and as the owner of X, the tech billionaire made it happen. Of course, X users preferred the format they had already gotten used to.
The reason behind reversing the change is unknown, but the social media company has made it happen. With that said, it's still not completely back to the way it was. Headlines and title pages appear over the images instead of being at the top of the post.
If the title of the linked article is long, the site will cut it off with an ellipses, as reported by The Verge. The text will also become smaller, which is still better than not having any indication as to what you'll be clicking when you open the included photo in a link.
Even with the removal of headlines, users still added them by typing the text manually, making the change useless anyway. Around November, Musk did say that the headlines would appear over URL cards, and the recent change is likely because of that.
The addition of a title over an image has not been rolled out for all devices yet. It was first seen through X on the web, but it has not appeared for iOS devices. As for Android, the title card still appears under the linked image of the article.
It's possible that the previous change was also to encourage news outlets to publish long-form posts on X instead, eliminating the need to exit the app entirely, although that's not likely to happen since websites need clicks for traffic.
After every change that X has gone through, including the name rebranding, adding back headlines is a welcome change. It makes it easier for people to share links without having to add the headline themselves.
X in 2023
People who have been on X long enough have seen the series of changes that were made ever since Elon Musk purchased the microblogging site. For the price of $44 billion, the valuation of the company has declined since, which says a lot about how the tech billionaire is handling it.
Some argue that the biggest mistake Musk made was changing the name of the site from Twitter to X. The former name is already an established brand, meaning that the Tesla CEO is wasting its potential by setting the name aside.
Of course, no one will forget Musk's whole "free speech" idea for the site, which led to not only a flurry of derogatory posts, but advertisers leaving the site because of it. This was somewhat the beginning of the downfall of the microblogging site since ad sales are its main source of revenue.
