Musk has now admitted his link penalty is not ‘merely’ a simple fixed penalty on the presence of a link or anything like that, but about as perverse as is possible:
To be clear, there is no explicit rule limiting the reach of links in posts.
The algorithm tries (not always successfully) to maximize user-seconds on 𝕏, so a link that causes people to cut short their time here will naturally get less exposure.
Best to post a text/image/video summary of what’s at the link for people to view and then decide if they want to click the link.
So, the higher-quality a link is, and the more people & time spent reading it, the more ‘the algorithm’ punishes it. The worse a link is, the shorter, more trivial, more clickbaity, the least worth reading, the less the algorithm punishes it and rewards it with virality. This explains a lot about Twitter these days.
(This also implies that it may be a bit hard to estimate ‘the’ link penalty, if the algorithm is doing anything to estimate the quality of a link so as to punish good ones more.)
Musk has now admitted his link penalty is not ‘merely’ a simple fixed penalty on the presence of a link or anything like that, but about as perverse as is possible:
So, the higher-quality a link is, and the more people & time spent reading it, the more ‘the algorithm’ punishes it. The worse a link is, the shorter, more trivial, more clickbaity, the least worth reading, the less the algorithm punishes it and rewards it with virality. This explains a lot about Twitter these days.
(This also implies that it may be a bit hard to estimate ‘the’ link penalty, if the algorithm is doing anything to estimate the quality of a link so as to punish good ones more.)