Musk hints that X deprioritizes links to keep users on platform

X owner Elon Musk has implied that the platform throttles the reach of posts, including links to external sites, to keep users from leaving. 

Replying to a post on X by popular user Paul Graham on Sunday, Mr. Musk said if users want their links seen by other users, they should write long descriptions of what is in the link and then post the link in the replies. 

“Just write a description in the main post and put the link in the reply,” Mr. Musk wrote on X. “This just stops lazy linking.”

Mr. Graham was criticizing a perceived deprioritization of links on X. He said that he visits X to “find out what’s going on, and you can’t do that without links.” Mr. Graham found Mr. Musk’s advice confusing. 

“If I write a new essay and tweet a link to it, that’s ‘lazy linking,’” Mr. Graham wrote in a reply to Mr. Musk. “But if I tweet that I’ve written a new essay and then put the link in a reply, that’s somehow better?”

Mr. Musk’s post seems to confirm what some journalists and X users had feared: X is keeping links off of user feeds so that users stay on the platform. Since Mr. Musk took over the site previously known as Twitter, reports have shown that X has limited the reach and performance of links to X competitors like Facebook. 

Additionally, X’s apparent deprioritization of links goes hand-in-hand with other policy decisions made by the Mr. Musk-run platform. Earlier this year, Mr. Musk announced that posts containing links to news articles would no longer automatically display the headline, with users needing to manually write out headlines and other text.