Google has reportedly removed much of Twitter’s links from its search results after the social network’s owner Elon Musk announced reading tweets would be limited.
Search Engine Roundtable found that Google had removed 52% of Twitter links since the crackdown began last week. Twitter now blocks users who are not logged in and sets limits on reading tweets.
According to Barry Schwartz, Google reported 471 million Twitter URLs as of Friday. But by Monday morning, that number had plummeted to 227 million.
“For normal indexing of these Twitter URLs, it seems like these tweets are dropping out of the sky,” Schwartz wrote.
Platformer reported last month that Twitter refused to pay its bill for Google Cloud services.
For one thing, this is sad because even more of the Internet is no longer reachable. The Internet shrinks, and will continue to get smaller as enshittification continues.
But on the other hand, this is really starting to look like the death knell of Twitter. It’s quickly becoming extremely inconvenient to see any tweets on Twitter now.
Fine by me. I never saw any value in it, even well before Musk took over. The character limit is guaranteed to eliminate any nuance, and the interface makes it incredibly difficult to follow what discussion there is.
I think originally when Twitter was created, the idea was that it would also be accessible via SMS and so the limit was imposed in order to allow a a tweet to fit into one SMS message.
We’ve had Twitter since SMS cost per-message on most plans.
It was great for following breaking news and not much else.
It worked quite well as an internet notice board where everyone could post important information to be shared/linked to.
Now whenever that is tried I just get a login screen
This was only a problem because of improper centralization in the first place. From that perspective, this is the Internet self-correcting a defect.
Yes, but it will suck in the meanwhile. People expect these links to last. But instead a huge amount of content will no longer be reachable.
I think it’s more along the lines of:
Musk: You can’t see tweets unless you’re logged in.
Google: Challenge accepted.
Was already pretty shit with embeds, now it’s just shit all around