the "remove the headline from links" thing that twitter is doing is coinciding with another wave of panic from artists about "links being nerfed" and engagement on things artists are promoting/selling being worse and i'm once again just like... idk feeling really morose about how susceptible people are to believing tall tales instead of the actually obvious "no people are just not using twitter that much because it's a hostile site" and social media at large has conditioned us to ignore promotional posts because users only want content.
seeing someone post the general thought of "links do so much worse here now" when i posted a promotional thing on tumblr and saw it do about as """good""" as it did on twitter like... it's not that Twitter is nerfing your engagement on promo posts, it's that people just don't respond to that shit on major social media sites. they've all done a bunch of changes over time, some subtle and some incredibly not, to shove Content™ down your throats and whether you like it or not it has absolutely gotten you to just scroll past shit when someone is trying to Sell a Thing.
it's not that different here to be clear! a post where you are trying to sell shit will very very likely do worse than a normal art post. but that's also normal! the people who want to click and buy shit will always be a fraction of a fraction of the people who just want to see art for free. has it gotten worse over time globally on the internet? of course. but the 'why' isn't like a switch got turned off, it's just a really slowburning consequence of every social media platform training users to not pay attention to that shit because you making money doesn't make them money.
