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Comment by hungryhobbit | Hacker News Reader

"War on hyperlinks"?

I get that Facebook is trying to make some $$$ on them here, but I wasn't aware we had any war (not even a "war on Christmas" fake war) going on against links.

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Posts containing links to external sites which are not owned by the parent company are downranked or outright excluded in many social media feeds. This has been a known pattern for many years.

It's not only Facebook doing it, but they are probably the biggest offender.

Is this what's behind the "link to the article in comments" that all news outlets do on FB?

this stuff might be cargo cult, but there's also an interaction/engagement signal because you have to expand the comments so the post itself might be higher ranked when they do this

No it's 100% placed in comments to try and circumvent Meta's down-ranking of posts with links. Posting in comments doesn't work any more however. Remembering the promise of the early internet, I really can't despise the gatekeepers any more than I do.

100%. Any link in the body of a post on any social media platform, if they even allow it, will cause it to be excluded from feeds. The post will only show when someone visits your profile directly.

They just realized 10 years ago that allowing people to click off-platform is terrible for engagement numbers, and they realized that they could just prevent it by silently suppressing such content.

You can't even put a link in a post to Instagram; student groups post links to events and say "click the link in our profile for more information" and the same is true for local news organizations.

And it's not like we are just spamming our own links, like I like to share links to news stories to my friends, family and followers.

For a long time. Essentially all social media will heavily downrank any post that includes a link. They don't want you leaving.

Try clinking hyperlinks on any modern platform that A) don't try to open in-platform, and/or B) don't try to generate an AI summary of its content as the default rather than open it (looking at you Hubspot), and/or C) don't hit you with a modal that requires you to check a box in addition to clicking through.

It's always like this. Just keep adding layers of friction until people don't bother. Engagement is still the obsession.

X deprioritizes content that includes links outside of X.

They removed that a while ago.

Do you have data? Because I don't know how to see their algorithm ranking objectively enough to verify.

https://github.com/xai-org/x-algorithm

The algorithm is open source and does not include logic for down ranking external links.

As well as LinkedIn. "Put your link in the first comment and pin it" was the workaround...

Every platform hates links. Xitter started trying to make links look like pictures, for example.

https://dev.to/ascorbic/bring-back-the-twitter-link-preview-...

In Instagram you can't really even put links at all. It's on purpose to keep you scrolling inside the walled garden.

It's a shame that Musk's politics are a distraction from the ways that Twitter has become hostile and worse for non-political reasons. That was the first place I became aware of hyperlinks causing posts to get hidden or downranked.

One could argue the two (Musk's politics and Twitter's actions) are related

To be fair, Twitter was always making terrible product decisions. They were just doing it with 3x the staff and spending back then.

The book "Hatching Twitter" is a pretty eye-opening history of Twitter from the very beginning. If true, Twitter pre-Elon was run by people with strange product opinions, in a fairly dysfunctional, ineffective way. Jack Dorsey, who comes across as a grade-A weirdo in the book, was first pushed out and later reinstalled in a palace coup.

X's algorithm no longer downranks for using links.

Extraordinary claims should come with extraordinary evidence. Also, as a layman outside their system, how can you verify this?

The owner of the site said so https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2082273378749268440 and it is backed by the open source algorithm they released.

https://github.com/xai-org/x-algorithm

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