on embed cards

i'm not a huge fan of embed cards, all things considered. while i wouldn't go as far as to say that i hate them, i always thought of the idea of them to be a bit ridiculous. really, why do they even exist in the first place?

well, the answer is Facebook and Twitter.

in the late 2000s, as Facebook was reaching its peak, it had a bit of a problem. you see, there are other websites on the internet. since users on Facebook can post links to other websites, a user would click off from Facebook from one of those links, only to not come back! Facebook, of course, did not want this happening. so, they wrote the Open Graph protocol, which would allow website owners to add machine-readable information about their pages! then, Facebook could conveniently package this information into a pretty little preview that users could then not have to click on, as the content they cared about was already displayed to them.

Twitter followed suit with Twitter Card, a much less cleverly named version of the exact same idea which inexplicably was just different enough in execution that every webmaster would forever have to include both. this was made especially true once apps decided they were going to use both at the same time to decide what exactly to display, in a way designed perhaps to ensure that no web developer will ever be able to actually debug what's happening with the damn things ever again.

now, i'm being a bit facetious there, of course. but if you've used a social network in the past decade, you've definitely ran into the kind of person who doesn't bother to click on links and blindly comments based on the headline and photo of an article alone. if embed cards are annoying, complicated, and encourage bad user behavior, why bother including them on a website in the first place?

well, it's hard to say why i do. you can, after all, just choose to ignore them entirely. still, when users have been trained to expect big juicy buttons dripping with succulent pictures and teasing headlines, a plain ol' link practically disappears in comparison. no amount of denial will change that i have to care about SEO and CTRs as much as any other webmaster in this era of the internet.