They literally send you away to read the article, but with the hope you come back to add comments.
In the case of the new twitter, it makes sense to prevent people from leaving the platform, since Musk wants his platform to replace everything, blogs (hence new unlimited size tweets), YouTube (unlimited length video) and he even talked about a currency.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/26/23808796/elon-musks-x-eve...
They started hosting their own images, then their own videos. This is expensive to do, but perhaps they felt that it was worth it to keep users on their site instead of risking them wandering off to Imgur.
And the new design discourages actually reading the article. When you click on a "link", it sends you to the comment page which has a small embedded thumbnail and blurb. (The old design took you to the article directly).
I do not think their decisions come from sound thinking but greed. They don't truly understand why they got big and now they're trying to squeeze all the money out of it they can before their luck runs out.
I think they did much better trying to give their users a good experience and they are in the process of killing the goose that laid the golden eggs. It just takes a long time for a zombie social network to die.
(tangent) Does this remind anyone else of Melissa Peterson from Seattle, WA?
I just visited Reddit in incognito mode.
Of the top 20 posts, 3 were links to articles. Most were images, videos, or text posts -- very similar to Twitter.
I read comments. Comments are the last bastion of pure ideas exchange, articles are just pretty conversation starters.