Elon Musk's X suddenly has a lot of 'articles.' I'm not sure I want to read them.

• X is promoting its "articles" feature by running a $1 million contest for the most viral article.
• An article about self-help recently went viral.
• Self-contained articles on X are missing out on the vibrant conversations around news that old Twitter had.

In the past few days on X, you haven't been able to escape a certain post that's gone viral. It offers to teach you "How to fix your life in 1 day." It's an "article," a newish feature that allows paid users to publish longer posts.

What, exactly, are these new articles, and why are they everywhere?

Let's start with the "How to fix your life" article, which has been retweeted more than 54,000 times. Its author, self-help writer Dan Koe, didn't respond to my DM asking to talk about his post. His article outlines steps to shifting your mindset to achieve goals. (This may be very appealing to people who have goals or strive for self-improvement, but as someone who is quite content to be stuck in my mediocre ways, this kind of self-help thing isn't really my jam.)

I would say that, just from a content standpoint, it's sort of unusual for something like this to go super viral — it's long, it's sort of hard to read, it's not about something newsy or buzzy like, say, a Hollywood mom group fallout. I can't say for sure why this captured so much attention last week; perhaps it was just the right timing, with X wanting to push the new article format.

The $1 million prize contest

Elon Musk's X is now offering a $1 million prize to whoever has the most viral article in the next week or so. As you might imagine, this has created a glut of articles, some of which are low-quality and likely generated by Grok or another AI.

The most interesting version of this so far is an article by a blogger who goes by "ratlimit," who posted an article saying that if they win the prize, they'll split the winnings with the people who retweeted it. So far, it's been RT'd over 1,600 times. Clever!

There's also, of course, a backlash. One article went moderately viral with the headline, "These ugly ass Articles have got to go," making the general point that these are unpleasant to come across in your timeline.

As someone who writes articles professionally, I suppose I have mixed feelings and a compromised perspective. I also enjoy reading lots of different kinds of articles. In fact, "reading articles" is one of my favorite pastimes! Not just news — I love a blog post! A review! A half-formed thought! Frankly, it feels like there aren't enough articles to read lately, and I welcome more.

But these X articles? I'm not sure this is it.

The problem is that articles written directly onto X are going to have a bit of a self-selection bias toward the kind of person who is really into X and wants to make money off X posts. That's probably … not someone I want to hear from a lot.

As X has gone deeper and deeper into a place that's somewhat unpleasant and potentially just kind of gross (the popular recent trend of asking Grok to undress people was, I think, a final straw for a lot of folks), is this really the place I want to read articles? Maybe! There's certainly still newsmakers on there, especially in certain niches like AI and tech, and hearing their thoughts is reason enough for me to stick around.

But is X a place I want to go for lengthy ideas about self-improvement? No, not even for a million dollars.