It’s really time to stop embedding tweets in articles

Techdirt will no longer embed tweets in its posts because Musk’s dramatic changes at Twitter make it less and less likely that the tweets will persist:

In response, I’ve asked everyone on the team that if they want to include tweets going forward that they should post screenshots of the tweet (which can link back to the original tweet) and then include the text (or a clear description) of the tweet in the text of the article.

I embedded a couple of Tweets in yesterday’s post – and I wonder if I should have done that. A little while ago, John O’Nolan of Ghost introduced me to Poet.so, which makes lovely Tweet-based graphics like this:

I expect to be using it more in the future, and you should consider doing so, too. It’s a shame, but we need to deal with the reality of what Twitter is becoming, not what it has been. As Techdirt’s Mike Masnick put it:

I’m disappointed that we need to do this, as embedding is a nice feature, and a core part of how the internet should work. And while I’m not expecting Twitter to just disappear overnight (or, really, disappear at all), the odds of it happening have jumped up to a degree that we need to plan ahead, and this is how we’ll be doing it going forward.