X (formerly Twitter) has long been a platform where people posted their articles and blog posts onto. After a writer posts an article, readers would see a nice and professional-looking featured image with the title and metadata. However, that’s no longer the case. X no longer shows the titles of articles, according to The Verge.
This is something that we heard rumors about before, but it didn’t seem like Elon was going to do it. Back in August, he posted that he was planning on going through with this. It’s one of those changes that we didn’t really think that he was going to follow through on; yet, here we are.
With no titles, articles on X just look like picture posts
If you just posted an article to your X timeline to be greeted with a picture, don’t worry, you didn’t make a mistake. Starting sometime Wednesday, users on the platform started to see that articles were being truncated, only showing their pictures.
Users on iOS first started seeing this change with users on the browser version seeing it hours later. At the moment, it doesn’t seem to be present on Android phones. We don’t think that Android users will be safe from this for long.
So, when you see an article, you’ll only see the featured image of the article. The only thing letting you know that it’s an article is the small text in the bottom left corner of the image. The text will show the site’s URL, and that’s it.
Why did Elon do this?
The reason for this was to improve the aesthetics of the people’s X feeds. The reduced height of the posts would mean that users would be able to see more content on their feeds.
This change is an answer to a question that no one asked. Of the issues affecting X, people aren’t arguing for more post-density. So, this change just seems like a useless change.
Hopefully, Elon walks this change back. It’s one of those changes that the majority of the people just oppose.