Human Web CollectiveDo links hurt news publishers on Twitter? Our analysis suggests yes
www.niemanlab.org/2026/04/do-links-hurt-news-pu…
Links are not the only thing keeping big news publisher from high engagement on tweets; there are lots of factors. But this analysis shows that the way that most big news publishers, with the exception of Fox News, really haven’t changed the way they tweet, even as the platform’s incentives have changed.
Not directly about the Fediverse but this is extremely important context for all of us when we advocate for the Fediverse. The lack of control over how things function on a platform like X has real, significantly negative impacts on the basic functioning of news organizations and entities that are trying to broadly inform the public. This is some good evidence of that as at a basic level it makes no sense for news organizations to be disincentivized in an algorithm because they posted a link. That is hostile to the idea of good journalism at a basic level and we need to make that point as people who understand how important the Fediverse is.
It’s the same on reddit - post an image and you’ll get way more engagement than a link.
I think the point of this article is that X is artificially depressing views to content that has links in it versus content that doesn’t, not that people don’t necessarily engage with links.
It's the business model.
Confusion and engagement help profits.
Resolution and enlightenment hurt profits.
Every link is a threat to the silo.
Consume quick content, get marginally happy, repeat until you get to posts you already saw, return to top and start feeling marginally happy again. Similar strategy, or at least result, as TikTok and gachas. And you can’t even hide posts there, like it’s on purpose so you get unconsciously trained into the idea of “top of the feed” = “being happy again”. And with images being more easily consumed, as well as locking the user into a given site, it feels like the algorithm is designed with addiction in mind.
Makes me wonder how much worse other platforms are, when they aren’t transparent, there aren’t studies, or even the studies get drowned by algorithms themselves.