In October last year, Elon Musk announced that X (formerly Twitter) would remove headlines from articles posted on the platform. At that time, Musk said that the change is being brought to improve how the timeline looks but reportedly, headlines are coming back to posts in a new avatar.
According to a report by The Verge, some people are seeing headlines on the web version of the platform.The headlines are now appearing over the images that link to those pages. Clicking on them will take users to the webpage.
What has changed
If a headline is too long, the permissible character limit is displayed and the rest is put behind an ellipsis. The text is small but it looks different than what was before. However, when we checked, members of the TOI Tech-Gadgets Now team did not see the updated timeline design.
Why headlines were removed
X removed headlines and Musk said that the aim was to greatly improve the aesthetics. The change reduced the vertical pixel space that articles take.
“X is changing how news links show up on the timeline. It will strip out the headline/text so links display only an article’s lead image,” the said in a post.
“It could also be another incentive for media to publish articles on X, or at least use the Long post feature to provide more context before the link,” X News Daily posted.
Removing headlines did make posts smaller but it was a bit problematic for viewers to quickly access the web page when something interests them. Additionally, news posters had to work a bit extra to include clickable links in the photos.
In November, Musk announced that headlines would reappear over URL cards in an “upcoming release.”
“In an upcoming release, 𝕏 will overlay title in the upper portion of the image of a URL card,” he tweeted.