X's Nikita Bier and Elon Musk say the platform stopped penalising posts with direct links over a year ago, prompting surprise from creators who still use the reply-link workaround.
X's head of product Nikita Bier has publicly told Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg that he no longer needs to bury links in the replies section of his posts, revealing in the process that the platform quietly stopped penalising link-only posts more than a year ago. The exchange, which played out on X, quickly drew reactions from creators who had spent years working around what they believed was an active algorithmic penalty against posts containing external links.
How the exchange unfolded?
The comment was posted as a reply to Zuckerberg, who had shared a note about Meta's vision for AI and superintelligence. Bier responded, "Hello Mark, you do not need to put the links in replies anymore. Thank you for your attention to this matter," a pointed reference to the long-standing practice, common among X and Twitter users, of posting a link in the replies to a text-only post rather than embedding it directly, a workaround built on the assumption that X's algorithm suppressed the reach of posts containing outbound links. Elon Musk backed up Bier's comment shortly after, replying simply, "We haven't for over a year."
A penalty many users believed was still active
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