Linked List: October 6, 2023

Friday, 6 October 2023

Snopes Shows the Folly of X’s New Link Presentation 

Another change this week at Twitter/X: they’ve stopped showing the headline for links in tweets. Jordan Liles, writing at Snopes under the splendid headline “Did Elon Musk Endorse Biden, Come Out as Transgender, and Die of Suicide?”:

On Oct. 5, 2023, a user on X named Armand Domalewski posted that the social media platform’s owner, Elon Musk, had announced his endorsement of U.S. President Joe Biden for a second term in the White House. “Elon Musk endorses Joe Biden for re-election,” the post read alongside a picture of Musk smiling.

However, this news was not true. Domalewski had created the post (archived) as somewhat of a satirical example of a recent decision made by X that removes visible headlines from posts that contain links.

The link in the post, which was only displayed as “Fortune.com,” led to an article with a headline that could only be read if users visited the website. That headline: “Elon Musk plans to remove headlines from news articles shared on X.”

Musk’s stated reason for the change: “Will greatly improve the esthetics.”

This justification, as Liles’s piece at Snopes exemplifies, is of course nonsense. Either show the full preview card, including the original site’s headline, or don’t show anything except the original URL. That’s the way Twitter worked for years: the full URL itself was visible in the tweet. But Twitter is now showing neither the original headline nor the URL, just the domain name of the source, along with the URL’s preview card image.

Clarity, in all things, is the height of aesthetic achievement. The best link presentation is the one that makes it the most clear where it will take you. What X is presenting today is obfuscating, not clarifying, and thus grotesque.

X Rolls Out New ‘Chumbox’ Ad Format – Post-Like Things That Can’t Be Reported or Blocked 

Matt Binder, reporting for Mashable:

Mashable has confirmed this ad format with numerous users from across X and have seen a variety of different ads running this bizarre new format that just consists of written copy text, a photo, and a fake avatar that’s sole purpose is to make the ad look like an organically posted tweet.

The type of content being promoted in the ads that Mashable has viewed appear to be consistent with ads found in spammy, low quality “chumbox” advertising — typically defined as those clickbait ads found at the bottom of posts on content farm sites — made popular by native ad networks like Taboola.

“This Seems Unbelievable, But Happens in Dubai Everyday” reads one ad that takes users to a third-party content mill website, overloaded with ads of its own. “These Incredibly Cool Gadgets That Are Going To Sell Out This Year. Action Now!” and “If you suffer from ringing ears (Tinnitus) you’re going to love this recent breakthrough” are other examples of some of the content found in these X ads.

Yaccarino keeps claiming that X is on the upswing, but looking at the actual content — especially the ads — says otherwise. These new “chumbox” ads are bottom-of-the-barrel stuff, the sort of ads I’d expect to see on a third-rate Twitter knock-off site like Truth Social. X itself now feels like a third-rate Twitter knock-off.

I fully expect them to continue scraping right through the bottom of the barrel and go even lower.

Patreon’s New Brand Identity 

Their new mark sort of looks like a smudged P, sort of looks like a bad sketch of a human brain, but mostly looks like a defective jelly bean.