‘Whoa—You Have GOT to Read This’
Reading Time: 4 minutes‘Whoa—You Have GOT to Read This’: MediaDownloader’s New Twitter Strategy, Explained, When X changed its policy on links, we changed ours., MediaDownloader’s new Twitter strategy, explained: ‘Whoa—you have GOT to read this.’
If you still spend any time on X, the social network once called Twitter, you might have noticed some unorthodox tweets—sorry, posts!—from this magazine’s account on Thursday. These and many, many more, exactly like them:
Yes, it was very annoying! And all a gag. Hahahaha. Ha. Whew!
Here’s the story. On Wednesday, X changed how links appear on the social network. This is specifically relevant to publications, which tend to post a lot of links. Before, sharing one would display a ‘card’ with that article’s headline and a photo. Now it’s just a photo, with the site’s URL displayed in a very small font. No headline at all. As Alex Kirshner explained in MediaDownloader, this yoinks away a keystone of Twitter’s utility: It is, or was, a website optimized for consuming and discussing the news. Now, however, those article links look like normal photos someone tweeted, making them easy to just scroll past. That’s the point: The move, which owner Elon Musk took credit for, is clearly about keeping users within X’s confines, the better to goose engagement on the platform and scrape for more revenue. It doesn’t hurt that it’s another jab in the eye of the elitist press, either.
For the media, this is kind of annoying and kind of irrelevant. Sure, MediaDownloader’s business depends in part on selling ads, and the more traffic we get, the more money we make. But traffic from Twitter has always been paltry compared to other referrers, something that’s true industrywide. (In our case, our biggest traffic drivers are generally Google, our own homepage, and Facebook—although that last one has been in its own decline for some time.) So if X—whose owner more or less despises the press, whose traffic rewards are negligible—is once again making our lives somewhat more difficult … who cares? Not only that, the already minuscule Twitter traffic to media sites has been dropping for a while, particularly amid changes implemented during the Musk era.
On the other hand, X, for all its problems, remains the place to discuss what’s happening right now, not just with our peers and sources and various subject-expert gadflies, but with newsmakers themselves. And journalists—to the correct dismay of many of us—are hooked on it. At this point, after a year of watching Musk degrade a website I truly have depended on for more than a decade, I feel a mix of nihilism and loathing about it all.
On Thursday, we basically decided to try to have some fun with that frustration. Yes, there are workarounds—the best thinking on how to distribute articles on press-hostile X is that a site like MediaDownloader should just put a headline in the post/tweet so that readers know what they’re getting. Another option, as media scholar Jeff Jarvis suggested, would be to put headline text on the art itself.
And sure, we could do that. But it’d be like rearranging your deck chair on a sinking ship that’s already asked you to leave. So we did something else.
Musk’s headline-stripping may be intended to keep users within X, but what it really does is incentivize clickbait. The headline is gone. The URL is easy to miss. You can say whatever you want to get readers to click! In theory, MediaDownloader is a respectable media outlet, thank you very much. But on X, should we bother to be?
A few hours after X implemented this change, I suggested to my colleagues that in lieu of bothering to write original posts for every article we want to share, we should just write ‘Haha holy shit WOW’ on all of them. After some workshopping, we decided to actually do this, and started sending out every tweet from @MediaDownloader with this language: ‘Whoa—you have GOT to read this.’ (Credit to MediaDownloader’s Dan Kois for the snappy copy.) Didn’t matter what each article was about. Whoa—gotta read it.
Guess what? It worked. The first nine posts we made in this vein got about twice as much engagement on X as the nine posts before them, which had language similar to the headlines of the pieces. Right now on X it pays to be mercenary and borderline deceptive.
Some of our readers, like this poor guy, begged us to ‘please stop.’ One reporter at a media-industry outlet emailed me asking for a comment on MediaDownloader’s new social strategy. Others clocked the joke immediately:
As of now, MediaDownloader’s X presence has returned to normal—which is to say, it plods on, reaping diminishing rewards on a platform that is indifferent, at best, to its presence. Twitter was for news. X’s owner may claim it’s a platform for ‘citizen journalism,’ but no one can honestly say that understanding events is easier on the platform these days. ‘For You’ feeds are clogged with insipid, LinkedIn-grade threads about workflow optimization using ChatGPT and also that Richard Hanania guy. (Or at least mine is!) It’s a watercooler that wants to drown you.
But it still offers the sense that most of the conversation one would want to participate in is (somewhere) there on X. That’s more a journalistic pathology than a levelheaded observation. It’s hard to untrain yourself from clicking on that thumbnail, from posting on an app that hates you. And it wasn’t Elon Musk who taught us to induce clicks by whatever means—it’s what we’ve been doing on Twitter for years, in one way or another. On X it’s now a new language: ‘Whoa—you have GOT to read this.’ Isn’t that what we’ve always been saying?
Reference: https://slate.com/technology/2023/10/slates-new-twitter-strategy-explained.html
Ref: slate
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