alt Hacker NewsI wonder if this is an effort to combat pages which post a short clickbait description and require you to click "read more" to see the full description, and often post the link in the comments. There are lots of sites (Polygon immediately comes to mind) which are notorious for doing this as a way to get fake engagement which boosts their posts which gets more clickbait engagement.
I know it's all speculation, and this does come across as more monetization creep, but I can't help to wonder if there's an underlying reason beyond "line go up".
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Is it so wrong for those who create content to want people to visit their website to consume that content? The alternative being that Facebook and Google summarize everyone's content and keep all the engagement and profit for themselves.
Yeah I mean it's a problem I'm in groups that just get tons of spam to things off-site that are mainly scams or just fake to get you to view a an ad-ridden page.
In today's AI world, it should be trivial for platforms to identify posts using suck tricks. They can simply ask an LLM "Does the following post contain some scummy engagement trick: $POST".
Then downrank them.
I have a friend who is a best-selling author, and her threads account was being heavily throttled (hundreds of likes a few months ago, fewer than ten now) -- it was suggested that it's because she is posting links away from Meta properties, and the way around it was this "link in the comments" tactic.
So it's not necessarily clickbait -- seems to be also an evolved workaround to fight throttling. :-/