Hi,

This week’s newsletter is a look at the recent features Twitter has been implementing and how it might affect artists + creators everywhere.

Let’s explore below.

Let’s dive in ⬇️

When speaking to my peers, it feels like the general consensus is that Twitter’s heydey was a few years ago and that it has since fallen off in recent years.

When asking people why they think that’s the case, I’ve heard varied responses:

• X’s new algorithm makes it harder to grow

• Post recommendations feel off the mark / random

• Lots of AI and political content focused on trolling, discourse, and inciting reactions as opposed to providing value

As someone who uses Twitter avidly for news and information (I can also thank Twitter for my start in the music industry 11 years ago), I’ve been following along as it makes a run at reinventing itself with a range of new features.

First, Twitter appointed Nikita Bier as Head of Product - he has been very public-facing in announcing new features, updates, and interacting with users to get feedback.

We’ll get to possibly the biggest new feature in a second but one of the things Twitter recently changed is how the algorithm prioritizes content:

According to that tweet, posts under 5 sentences perform the best as opposed to threads or more in-depth analysis.

It’s a far cry from a few years ago when Twitter threads were the fastest vehicle to growth.

Quite possibly their biggest feature yet was quietly implemented last week.

Twitter has historically deprioritized tweets with external links in them. Reason being that when a user clicks an external link (especially on mobile), it opens a new browser taking you to the contents of that link.

Very rarely does the user actually go back to the original tweet and engage with it, even if the content within the link was amazing.

For example:

1. I click the link to an article on Twitter

2. The contents of that link opens up in a new browser on my phone

3. I read the article in that browser

4. Even if I love the article, it’s very unlikely I go back to the orginal tweet and engage with it (like it, retweet, quote, etc) because I’m already in another window.

Even if I loved the article, because I’m not engaging with the original tweet, Twitter has no idea whether the content of that tweet is good or not - as a result, the lack of engagement signals it wasn’t good content and it doesn’t get prioritized in the algorithm.

Based on my research, it doesn’t seem like Twitter is deprioritizing links directly so much as they’re just not just getting signals from user behavior that content with links are good and thus deserve to be rewarded in the algorithm.

Here comes the new feature.

Now, when clicking on a link within a tweet on mobile, instead of it opening in a new window, the link opens up in the same window with a collapsable tweet at the bottom.

Essentially - users now have the ability to read the content and engage with it in the same window, making it more likely that great content gets engaged with (because now the ability to retweet, like, etc is at the bottom of the screen), increasing the likelihood that content gets pushed into the algorithm.

Let’s look at an example.

Here is what a Billboard tweet with a link looks like on mobile (before clicking into the link).

Here’s what it looks like when you click the link:

You’ll notice the article opens directly within Twitter and at the bottom of the window is the actual tweet itself (as a collapsable tweet) with the ability to reply, retweet, like, favorite, etc.

It’s still in the early days so who knows how impactful it will actually be but there’s a chance it could help artists + creators…

• Artists including links to their music, show tickets, merch, etc

• Creators including links to their content

Users can now engage with the content within the app in a way that more directly favors the content within the algorithm.

Hopefully this was helpful on your journey.

Thanks for reading, until next time.

_{The Vault}

 1) Emergent - my cousin actually introduced me to this one! It’s similiar to Lovable, a platform that can be used for building web applications with AI but Emergent has more integrations. For example, it recently just integrated with Claude Sonnet 4.5 More info HERE