Elon Musk is the walking epitome of “often wrong, never in doubt” and personally, I’m now deriving great joy out of the absolutely asinine product features he’s been unveiling with the hubris of a man who thinks he could build a deep-sea submersible in his garage using only parts he already has lying around the house. So it is with joy in my heart, and a Nelson Muntz-esque “ha ha” on the ready that I share with you his newest, greatest product feature for Twitter (#NeverCalledX), a site he seems hell-bent on ruining through utter incompetence: Musk has personally mandated that all news links and headlines should be removed from automatically embedding, leaving behind merely the article’s lead image.
Basically, Elon’s new mandate is no information, just vibes, apparently. Tech Crunch explains the new edict further:
Currently, a Twitter card for a news article or a blog post shows the headline and summary text (just on the web) along with the header image in the preview card of a post. However, if the proposed change comes through, X will only show the image with a link in a post. That means if a publication or a blog doesn’t post any accompanying text with the link, users will only see the link and the image for that article.
Obviously, this is a desperate attempt to entice users to publish their work directly to the platform, which Musk has admitted as much:
Naturally, anyone who has ever read a sign and told it out loud “You can’t tell me what to do!” would obviously already have a workaround for Musk’s newest donkey-brained decision: Like, for example, simply have written text on the lead image. Or write the headline in the accompanying tweet. However, since Musk has most likely never had anyone tell him no, ever, and has surrounded himself with paid sycophants and the weirdest online weirdos imaginable that congratulate him on every move as if he’s playing chess against Bobby Fisher himself, he has most likely not thought of these Scooby Doo-level workarounds.
He’s too caught up on the aesthetics, you see. Per Tech Crunch:
A source told Fortune that the update aims to reduce the height of a post to fit more posts on one screen. They also said that Musk thinks that removing headlines from the preview card will reduce clickbait. However, with no preview card, publications or blogs can simply write any text inciting users to click on the link.
If I stop to think about how this man has bought his way into the virtual town square and is hamfistedly trying to make it his own private clubhouse, I will get angry. So I’m not going to think about that. Instead, I’m going to bask in the glow of yet another Musk dumb decision because that man is desperate to be seen as a genius. If you check the time stamp on the “it came from ME” Tweet above, you’ll see he posted it at 11:32 his time, and I don’t know about you, but I know I have much better things to be doing at that time than proudly announcing to the world I don’t know anything in the name of aesthetics.
(Photo by Chesnot/Getty Images; Walt Disney Television)
