Is X Making It Harder to Share News? Paul Graham Weighs In

Musk criticised the users of X who share the links of other websites instead giving a brief description on their post, interrupting the app’s revenue.

A few days ago, it was officially announced by the CEO Elon Musk that X is the number one news app in the Apple store in India. X is widely known and utilized by many people around the world to convey their message, or news, or any content to everyone. Based on the given reports, around 611 million active X users are utilising this social media platform.

Currently, Musk has been questioned regarding the X’s deprioritization of the other website links which is attached along with the post of the users. The American computer scientist and entrepreneur Paul Graham, has tweeted regarding the deprioritization of links and he criticised that is the “biggest flaw” of X. 

Why has X been introduced with new changes?

Elon Musk never encourages the users to utilize his platform to profit from other websites or applications. He dislikes the practice of users who use the links to convey the message or information which are available in other websites by posting it on X without any description or comments. Musk states that as “Lazy Linking”. To eradicate this practice Elon Musk introduced a few changes in X, the links which are posted directly without any description will be deprioritized. 

This new change will provide less visibility to the tweets with the external links with no description. It insists the users give those informations which are available in the links as summaries or additional context. The link can be attached as a reply so that it might not disturb the revenue and retention of users of the X platform. Notes, Content Summaries are the two newly introduced features which could make the X more authentic with direct messages, informations rather than being a traffic generator for other websites. 

The aim of Musk’s new strategy is to hold the users of X with themselves and improve the direct conversations with the less prioritized “lazy linking”. Many users have opposed this new feature of X.

“Just write a description in the main post and put the link in the reply. This just stops lazy linking” replied Elon Musk to the criticism of the computer-scientist, Paul Graham.

“Our algorithm tries to optimize time spent on X, so links don’t get as much attention, because there is less time spent if people click away. Best thing is to post content in long form on this platform.” said Musk about the new features of X.