X competes with WordPress, adding a feature to write and share blogs on the social media platform. It is another addition to the platform that may be of interest to business users. At the same time, the question remains whether X can convince those business users to return to the social media platform.
In the past, the social media platform X has lost large numbers of users. This is because Elon Musk’s acquisition meant abrupt innovations that often had negative consequences. Although Musk aims to transform X into an “everything app,” it will take time for his vision to be fully implemented. Earlier, it came up with a competitor for Teams and Slack, and an e-mail service, XMail, is also in the works.
Now, it is also coming up with a competitor to WordPress by adding the ‘Articles’ blog feature. News articles or blogs could thus be typed and published by a user directly on X. X shared the news appropriately in an Article. While the details of Musk’s vision are becoming clearer, it is still unclear whether the new offering will be compelling enough, as there is a caveat to the blog feature that may deter journalists.
Usability sparks interest
The Articles offering includes options to customize the blog’s layout. These include italicizing or bolding text and customizing the font. The writer can also add images and videos to the text. Regarding word count, the blogger won’t run into trouble either. For example, according to a test by Engadget, it appears to be possible to type a 15,000-word blog.
Users further have the advantage of not having to do web development to shape their website for publishing blogs. Moreover, it is difficult to attract readers to a particular website. By contrast, on X, a blog with the right hashtags can generate traffic, which makes it easier than optimizing the blog to rank high in search results. According to the announcement, the articles will definitely land on the timeline of the blog writer’s followers. In addition, the blogger will have a new tab on the profile where all the earlier published blogs can be found.
The offer is only available to X users who own the Premium+ subscription. The subscription costs sixteen euros per month. Business users can also access the features through the verified business account. That’s basically another form of a paid account, which requires an X Blue subscription.
Breaking ties and rebuilding them
Prices for a WordPress account start from four euros per month. However, it is important to keep in mind that X helps the user save on web development. Especially for beginning bloggers or companies that do not immediately have the financial resources to invest in a decent website, there are advantages to X’s offer. For one thing, it is more interesting to have a place to publish a blog in a standard layout. An additional advantage is that X attracts millions of active users each month. A blog is more likely to get noticed than a WordPress site that has a simple layout to avoid investing in web development.
In addition, X is trying to launch an offering that should be attractive to news organizations. Those same news organizations were disadvantaged by X in the past. The links from Substack, a newsletter publisher, were permanently removed from the timeline of X users. There was also another debacle over the removal of titles in links to articles. Later, the titles reappeared but in a smaller font size.
In a similar course of breaking ties first only to rebuild them later, the connection between advertisers and X can be described. They were first driven away when X abandoned all rules about the content of a post. Many advertisers subsequently left the platform to avoid having their ads published on the side of a sexually-tinged post. Later, the social media platform tried to get these advertisers back with subscriptions where advertisers pay to not end up next to spam.
Learning resources for Grok
The timing for X to introduce blogs seems not to be coincidental. X benefits from the new feature through the arrival of the AI chatbot Grok. Blogs are a direct source of training for this chatbot, as the AI model trains on all the posts on X. Musk previously called this a “huge advantage over other models”.
Earlier, we would have taken that statement not all too seriously, as Musk has been scrutinized in the past for not thoroughly addressing the spread of fake news and not being able to block bots on X. This harms the reliability of Grok’s answers. The arrival of a blog feature may change if X manages to attract sensible business users and news organizations.
News organizations will have to keep this aspect in mind, though. After all, the articles they publish through the blog feature come into Grok, while the author or news organization is not paid for this. It works the other way around, and they have to pay X to publish the blogs and articles on the platform. Many news organizations are not too keen on LLMs being trained just based on their input. For that reason, some news organizations decided to sell their content to AI developers or sued AI developers for using the content without their permission. In the offer on X, users will give permission in the terms and conditions for using X.
The everything app
That leaves the question of exactly where X as a social media platform wants to go. It has long been known that Elon Musk has a very ambitious vision for Twitter in his sights. Following in the footsteps of China’s WeChat, he wants to turn the platform into an “everything app”. For a long time, speculation has been around what that term would actually mean. The recent additions to the offering show users more and more what to expect for the future of X.
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