X Deactivates Old Media Links Amid Changes to Back-End Elements

It appears that evidently X’s migration from the old Twitter branding goes to take loads more unwinding as yet.

Over the weekend, reports emerged that each one images and videos attached to any tweet created before 2014 had been rendered inactive within the app, in what initially gave the impression to be a cost-reduction measure.

Many speculated that this was likely brought on by a discount in storage, or a change to X’s network configuration, designed to reduce its data load, and thus reduce the corporate’s operating costs. But various investigations have since found that the media elements are still available, they’re just not where they ought to be, and as such, X’s system is having trouble finding the source and displaying it in posts/tweets.

However it’s inconsistent. Some people can see images and clips in some tweets, others are only showing text-based t.co links.

Some have suggested that the changeover from HTTP to HTTPS around 2014 could possibly be responsible for the change, essentially de-railing some newer clean-up work by the X team, while others have hypothesized that perhaps this was a deliberate deactivation, with a view to see if users could be upset about losing these links.

The impact for users is that you just wouldn’t have the ability access any of that content, which could possibly be annoying for retrospective searches, while for brands, it will mean that any embedded tweets with video or images would now not be energetic in your website, and any of your classic campaigns would essentially be erased.

Well, not erased, as they’re seemingly still somewhere on the net. But gone from view, and possibly gone without end, if that is indeed an actual test of a future direction for the app.

One other theory is that that is all a part of Twitter.com transitioning to X.com as its home domain, and the X team encountering issues with mass data migration. Indeed, the platform remains to be predominantly branded as ‘Twitter’ and ‘tweets’ in all of its documentation and code, and it is going to likely face many challenges like this in making the switch.

We don’t know exactly what’s occurring, and we are able to’t ask because X doesn’t have a press contact anymore, but it surely does look like it’s making some type of major change to its back-end infrastructure, which I’m tipping is linked to its domain switch.

Or, as noted, it could possibly be a cost-cutting measure, as X continues to work to get back into the black, amid significantly reduced ad intake.

We’ll likely discover soon, as X continues to make changes to its internal architecture.