Is Elon Musk continuing to kill off X as he moves to remove headlines from posts on the platform?

Elon Musk continues to ‘tweak’ the platform formerly known as Twitter, with the news that he is now removing headlines from posts in order to preserve the ‘esthetics’ of the platform. Although this news was first announced back in August, some users have now discovered a lack of headlines for articles shared on X.

The change has modified how media companies and publishers distribute content on X. With the headline no longer appearing below the image, posts may lack context unless the headline is included as the text of the post or within the shared article's image. 

Despite this change, articles shared to X will still link back to the original site when users click on the featured image; some X users reported that they were still seeing headlines displayed in articles in their timeline as of Wednesday.

The move comes at a time when X CEO Linda Yaccarino shared information at Vox Media's Code 2023 tech conference that demonstrated there was a drop in users on the social media platform: the company currently has 225 million daily active users – a decline in tens of millions or 11.6 per cent of users from just before Musk acquired the company.

That news from earlier this week comes ahead of the one-year anniversary of Musk taking over the social media platform, bringing a sink into the head offices in San Francisco and ‘tweeting,’ as it was called at the time, to let that fact sink in that he was taking over the company. Since his acquisition, long-time users of the micro-blogging platform have had to contend with a name change to “X,” the return of a number of controversial names on the platform and even Musk polling users if he should step down as the owner.

So could Musk’s constant tinkering be driving users away, or has the inclusion of previously banned users on the platform perhaps made users a little more weary about how they consume their daily updates among some of the ‘toxicity’ many continue to complain runs rampant on the platform?