An analysis of the 200 most-recent tweets on X by 18 big publishers indicates links seem to hurt engagement, after debate arose over X's value for sharing news
Engagement for tweets from @nytimes (53 million followers) is dwarfed by engagement for tweets from @GlobeEyeNews (866,000 followers).
Nieman Lab Laura Hazard Owen
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Discussion
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@natesilver538
Nate Silver
on x
@TheStalwart I mean, there's really 4-5 things: 1) Per se algorithmic penalty for links (disputed) 2) UX “enhancements” that discourage clicking links 3) Deprioritization of “following"/chronological feed in favor of “for you” 4) Learned behavior from users #3 probably the most i…
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@natesilver538
Nate Silver
on x
The NYT published a link to critical original reporting on Iran 45 minutes ago. A good, fair story. They have 53m followers. The engagement metrics you display say they got 94 likes and 33 retweets out of that. Is that accurate? And if so, shouldn't you work on a better algo? [im…
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@nikitabier
Nikita Bier
on x
@NateSilver538 It's paywalled. If only 0.1% of users can derive value from the content, it will organically rank lower.
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@natesilver538
Nate Silver
on x
In what sense is it intellectually dishonest, Nikita? The context is clear. My thesis is: I think your algo surfaces too little quality. And I think your excuses in these back-and-forth exchanges have been validating of that. To your credit, it's clear enough you agree with me.
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@zach_barnett
Zach Barnett
on x
@nikitabier ... Here's a crazy thought: What if you just showed tweets to the accounts that follow them? The whole point of Twitter is that I control my feed, not you. Wild that you don't understand that.
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@phl43
Philippe Lemoine
on x
After the exchange between @NateSilver538 and @nikitabier, I did a little test to check whether that was true and, to my surprise, what I found suggests that link deboosting was indeed reversed. What I did is randomly sample 15 tweets by @nytimes between 2019 and today, compute […
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@phl43
Philippe Lemoine
on x
@nikitabier ... Obviously something in the algorithm changed in 2023, because clicking on a link was also covering the engagement buttons before that, yet the reach of posts containing a link suddenly collapsed around that time. This may not have resulted from an explicit penalty…
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@storyofthegoats
@storyofthegoats
on x
@NateSilver538 Omg you two seriously I just wanna see my baseball tweets not this debate
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@nikitabier
Nikita Bier
on x
@phl43 ... Just to be absolutely crystal clear: 1. Links were never “deboosted” 2. They received lower engagement because websites cover the very buttons that cause something to rank better in the algorithm. 3. Today, the buttons are no longer covered, so links now have the same …
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@natesilver538
Nate Silver
on x
People like me who have been using Twitter through every iteration have a lot of muscle memory about what drives traffic and ultimately revenue. It used to be much easier to get people off site and that created *more* incentive to build your following by engaging on-site too.
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@natesilver538
Nate Silver
on x
@TheStalwart If you follow an account like @nytimes that doesn't “engage"/interact much b/c you're using Twitter as a news feed to “monitor the situation”, and there's little algorithmic reward for following an account and none for clicking on external links, it will get depriori…
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@thestalwart
Joe Weisenthal
on x
It's almost certainly true that part of the reason the NY Times twitter account doesn't get much engagement is because they're not really even trying. But also: [image]
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@ernie.tedium.co
Ernie Smith
on bluesky
FWIW the NYT doesn't get much engagement because we changed the rules for how links worked and they didn't play ball because they're a news organization that publishes reporting on their own website and not ours. — (via www.niemanlab.org/2026/04/do- l...) [image]