Will a New Twitter Linking Policy Bring Writers and Journalists Back?

Twitter used to be a place lots of journalists used. Then Elon Musk bought it, changed a lot — including its name — and lots of journalists left.

Now Twitter — which now calls itself X — would like them to come back, says Nikita Bier, the company’s head of product. And it’s promising to treat them better.

“If you’re a writer or journalist who left X in the last couple years, coming back could be the biggest arbitrage opportunity of your career,” Bier wrote Sunday.

The pitch to writers and journalists boils down to this: Bier says that if people put links to outside sites — like something you’ve written — those posts can get more attention than they do right now.

How that’s going to be accomplished is a little technical, and also a little confusing. (I’ve asked Twitter/X for clarification but haven’t heard back.)

Bier posted a short video showing the way a link on a Twitter post might show up in a user’s timeline, but so far I’ve yet to see it in the wild.

What’s important is that Bier is noting a big reason why people who make stuff use Twitter less these days: Right now, when you include a link in a Twitter post, Twitter’s algorithm makes it harder to find. Bier says Twitter wants to fix that.

If that’s true, that would be a real change for Twitter under Musk’s ownership. Soon after taking over, Musk said posts with links would be harder to find — because links take people away from Twitter, and he wants you to stay:

All of which has led to people like me trying all kinds of weird workarounds when we want to share something on Twitter today.

The current conventional wisdom calls for putting something attention-grabbing in a post without a link, then adding a link in a reply, like this:

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And then this:

Does it work? No clue.

This is normally the part where I tell you there are lots of reasons some writers and journalists stopped using Twitter, and that the way their links were handled is only one of them. Which, true.

The bigger point is that Twitter’s “don’t leave” stance isn’t unique. Every big platform feels the same way.

That’s why Google increasingly answers your questions on its own pages instead of sending you elsewhere. And why you see “link in bio” in people’s Instagram’s captions — because clumsily sending people to a single clickable link in your IG bio is the only way to drive someone off the app and onto your site.

And it’s why professional posters on platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn are always trying to figure out the best/least-bad way to direct you to something they’ve published. The current conventional wisdom for those platforms, by the way: You don’t include any link at all in your post. Instead you provide the link in a comment.

Twitter used to be different from other platforms, because many of Twitter’s earliest users were writers and journalists who used the service to see what other people were making/talking about, and to promote the stuff they were making/talking about. Linking out and browsing for links was a primary use case for many of us.

So when Musk took over in 2022 and Twitter became actively hostile to link-sharers, it was quite an abrupt change. But my hunch is that Twitter would have been headed in this direction no matter who owned the platform.

Last question: If Twitter/X really is trying to get people to share links on the site again, what does that tell us about the state of Twitter/X?