CLEVELAND, OHIO (TheOBR.com) - Good morning, Cleveland Browns fans!
Welcome to my annual (monthly?) rant about how running a Cleveland Browns website is a challenge and a half. I know that you're here to read about the Cleveland Browns, but we're into the "nothing is happening" part of the year, so I need to find other topics occasionally.
I've spent the better part of three decades building websites and writing about football, which means I've spent the better part of three decades watching platforms come and go. AOL keywords. MySpace bulletins. The surge of blogs. Facebook pages that actually reached people. Current hotspots like Substack will inevitably join them. And now, the slow, grinding collapse of Twitter — I'm sorry, "X" — as a place where you can reliably find news.
I recently tried to make my Twitter death-scrolling more enjoyable, so I followed a number of popular Browns accounts run by fans who post endlessly about the team. I figured it was a good way to follow what fans are really thinking.
It was not a good experience. Many of them spend their time regurgitating information from the same media Browns accounts they seem to hate for reasons unclear, poking fun at them along the way. Some of them are snarky to the extreme, where anything other than themselves is a target for ridicule. It was unpleasant and a sense of humor that doesn't really jibe with mine. So, I unfollowed many of them and went back to following the same sites that actually post news and original analysis.
But engagement farmers crying "look at me!" online aren't the biggest problem with Xitter.
The uncomfortable truth is that the platform is making it increasingly difficult for you to find the journalism you're looking for.
Last month, Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab published a study confirming what a lot of us in the news business have suspected for a while: X's algorithm actively punishes posts that contain links to external articles. Laura Hazard Owen analyzed 200 recent tweets from each of 18 major publishers. She plotted them on a graph that had links on one axis and engagement on the other. The finding was stark: "The traditional, link-loving publishers are clustered in the bottom left corner (lots of links, little engagement) in a nearly indistinguishable mass of bubbles, no matter how large their followings."
Translation: The New York Times, with 53 million followers, gets smoked in engagement by aggregator accounts with a fraction of the audience — accounts that post only text, no links. Why? Because the algorithm sees a link as a "leave the platform" button, leaving the platform means you're not scrolling, not seeing ads and not generating data. The algorithm punishes the exit.
Nate Silver — the statistician who built FiveThirtyEight — called X "next to useless" for breaking news earlier this year. He pointed to a specific example: a New York Times original story about Iran received 94 likes and 33 retweets. From 53 million followers. That's not a typo.
Twitter, X
Twitter, X, Xitter, whatever it's called now (Photo: Unsplash, 247Sports)
Nikita Bier, X's Head of Product, admitted as much: "For creators, a common complaint is that posts with links tend to get lower reach." The justification is that when users click a link and leave, they don't return to engage, so the algorithm "gets no clear signal whether the content is any good." The solution, apparently, is to bury the content so thoroughly that nobody sees it to click it in the first place.
The practical effect for Browns fans is this: the journalists doing original reporting — Mary Kay Cabot breaking news at cleveland.com, Jake Trotter working sources at ESPN, the OBR staff digging up stories — are algorithmically disadvantaged compared to accounts that simply copy the information into a text-only post with no attribution. The people who do the work get the fewest eyes. The people who repackage the work get the engagement.
This isn't new. It's been getting worse for years. But the Nieman study puts numbers to what we've all felt, and the numbers are grim. Links are penalized by an estimated 30-50%, according to social media analytics firm Hashmeta. X's own open-source algorithm code confirms that tweets containing external links are flagged for reduced distribution.
NPR has stopped posting to X entirely. The Guardian has as well. Most publishers remain, but the math is getting harder to justify — Twitter drives only about 1.5% of publisher traffic, unchanged since 2016, while the cost of maintaining a presence on a platform that structurally penalizes your content keeps rising.
I don't know what the answer is. I'm a webdork who writes a daily newswire, not a platform engineer. But I do know this: the work that goes into covering your football team — the reporting, the sourcing, the analysis, the film study — deserves to be seen. It also costs money. And when the distribution pipes are engineered to bury it, everyone loses except the people repackaging other people's work for engagement bait.
Anyway. That's the thing.
A SHORT SUNDAY NOTEBOOK
I'm not covering the endless quarterback-battle stories, which make up 90% of the links I found this morning. I'm tired of it, and so are you.
The Browns wrapped mandatory minicamp on June 12, which means we have now entered that dangerous part of the NFL calendar where every 53-man roster projection looks both reasonable and completely deranged, sometimes in the same paragraph. Chris Easterling at the Akron Beacon Journal took his post-minicamp swing at it (paywalled), noting that the first training camp practice is expected in the final week of July and that the cutdown to 53 is expected around 4 p.m. on August 30, even if the league has not officially announced the date yet.
June roster projections are mostly a scented candle. They smell like football. They do not block anybody in September. Still, this is the stretch where the back-end roster battles start to form in our heads: the extra quarterback, the developmental receiver, the special-teams body, the offensive lineman who can fake competence at three spots without getting somebody maimed. As hobbies go, it beats yelling at weeds in the driveway. A bit.
Elsewhere, Pro Football Talk had a couple of former Browns names in rough headlines: Terrelle Pryor was reportedly arrested last month near Pittsburgh for drug possession, and Andre Rison is serving jail time in Michigan after pleading guilty to a second-offense DUI. There is not much joy in either item, obviously. Pryor's 2016 season in Cleveland — 77 catches, 1,007 yards — remains one of the weirder bright spots from a miserable Browns era, and Rison's brief Cleveland stay is part of the franchise's pre-move fog bank. Sometimes the Newswire points to hope. Sometimes it points at reminders that these are human beings after the highlights stop.
SOME SITE NOTES
We're going to put some of our video features on hiatus for a while. There's little to talk about over the next five or six weeks, and my "big secret project" is taking hold of my life. You will all learn about it in the months to come. More on this later.
Have a good one! GO BROWNS!
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Positive news from the world of sports and beyond...
Some birds, crows particularly, are smarter than we think. A Canadian woman named Leah Wilson helped rescue an injured young crow from a roof gutter, got help from firefighters, took the bird to a wildlife veterinarian, and now apparently has a neighborhood crow fan club leaving her little thank-you gifts. Good News Network says the first gift was a feathered bundle dropped at her feet, which is frankly better than most of the thank-you notes I have received from the internet.
Wilson connected the experience to being raised with respect for the natural world. The rescued crow was eventually released with a leg band and still visits. I am not saying this proves crows have better long-term relationship skills than some humans, but I am also not not saying that.
Woman Who Rescued Injured Crow Keeps Getting Thank-you Gifts from Other Birds
WRAPPING UP
When not wondering whether a murder of crows could solve the Browns' developmental quarterback problem, Barry McBride is the Publisher and Founder of the OBR and bloviates this nonsense every morning. You can follow him on Twitter @barrymcbride or write him at barry@theobr.com if you are so compelled.
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