I can understand Elon Musk’s push in most cases, in trying to drive certain actions on X, like reducing the reach of tweets from non-X Blue subscribers in order to boost Blue take-up, or limiting the reach of posts with external links to better incentivize direct posting to the app.

I get it-it's pretty transparent logic. Though I think he often overlooks the potential negatives of such changes in the grand scheme of things and in terms of how they might change the way people, as well as influential users, interact with the app.

The latest example on this front is that X will soon be showing link previews in a totally different way, with the headline and preview text stripped, leaving only the header image.

the new Twitter link preview will retain the original link display in the tweet, with the header image, and a URL overlaid on the image.
In other words, the lower text panel will disappear while there is no longer going to be an automatic header or preview text snippet. There will be image preview and that's it, which puts more onus on users to create X-specific posts, as opposed to relying on the article link to provide information necessary for the task.

Change Confirmed
X owner Elon Musk has confirmed that change, which he claimed full responsibility for.
This view is that the timeline will now better compress, and overall presentation will be improved, with Elon being explicit in that he wants to reduce the amount of space a link tweet occupies in-stream.

X also allegedly is telling chosen partners that the new look will assist in countering clickbait. I mean, people will still be able to write the same text manually, so it's not entirely clear how this will assist in negating bait clicks, but this, apparently, is another reason.

It's reportedly also been pretty unpopular among brands in early feedback, but X is going ahead anyway, which might just affect your X posting process substantially.

Basically, if you’re putting any reliance on preview cards, you’ll need to change your approach, in order to ensure the best presentation for your shared links. It could also impact your older posts, with the same format likely to be applied to all active content. So all your link posts will probably revert to a single image, which could erase a lot of context from your original tweet/post.

But there's not much you can do about it, other than planning for how you maximize such moving forward, with the change set to come into effect any time soon.

And in line with Elon's other changes designed to reshape user behavior, the new format could also be a means for X to push more journalists towards posting on X itself, which could also explain this recent tweet.
With long-form tweets now available in the app, plus subscriptions, and its ad revenue share scheme, X is trying to get more original content shared direct to the app-and it's been keen to highlight the big payouts that some users have been getting in the early days of the new ad revenue scheme.
Maybe, if X can persuade more users that native posting is a better option, that'll help to make X a much more relevant news platform, and more fundamentally draw more users to the app for fresh analysis and insight. Though it's a tough call to see many journalists looking forward to accepting Elon's offers on this front, considering the fact that he continues to bash any publication that dares to criticize him, Tesla, X, or indeed anything else that he may decide is a personal affront.

Just today, Musk added Mashable to the list of publications that he has a problem with, while Elon has also directly criticized The New York Times, Reuters, The Guardian, Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, and the BBC, all just in the last few months. X is now also constraining the spread of posts to at least some of these outlets, according to recent tests, underlining Musk's contempt for certain media outlets.

Yet, that angst might be where he is underestimating the effect of this new change.

By making link previews less desirable to post externally within the app (note: all external links cop a reach penalty too, as Musk recently confirmed), the ideal outcome for X would be that more people start posting direct to the app; but as noted, many journalists are not exactly excited to start feeding into the X machine, given Musk's regular criticism of their profession.

The more likely outcome, then, is that this will be another push for journalists to reduce their reliance on the app. Which Musk himself might not have a problem with, but the problem for X, in this case, is that the value of the platform as a news source has arisen purely due to its popularity among journalists who use the platform to not only track the latest stories but also to share reporting and insights in real-time.

That's what's made X a critical app, despite its relative presence. In terms of overall usage, X's 250 million users pales compared to Facebook, TikTok and Instagram, with even Snapchat seeing far more active engagement. But even so, X has remained a key platform for many, largely because it's where the news breakers are engaging with many stories starting on X, before being aggregated out to every other source.

As such, X's influence is far larger than what its raw user numbers reflect. But with such a small relative user base-and only a fraction of that lot actually posting in the app (90 percent of X users read but never post or even engage in the app)-any decline among that main cluster of active posters could have a serious impact on the app.

Which is why updates like this pose a major risk. Again, hopefully, this encourages more people to share more original content in the app, but that too is predicated on people actually needing X and that they want to continue to maximize engagement in the app.

What if they don't? What if, as a result of changes like this, they simply start to focus elsewhere instead, and X loses out, as journalists reduce their reliance on the app, and build new communities elsewhere?

This is the flip side to Elon's forceful changes: actually, they could backfire, and hurt X more than help.

Add to this the fact that Threads is launching a desktop app this week, and that link posts on Threads are already formatted better than on X, and you can bet that this update will have a heap of publications and journalists checking in on Google Analytics to see just how much referral traffic they're getting from X, and whether it's worth implementing an entire new posting process.

It probably is for now, but unpopular changes like this are unlikely to drive the outcomes that Musk wants.

Then again, he continues to claim that X is seeing record levels of "cumulative user seconds", so maybe he is a genius after all.