X Adds More Sports Engagement Options to Maintain Community Engagement

With Meta making a bigger push to lure sports communities over to its apps, X is looking to fight back, by adding various new sports engagement options which it hopes will enhance game day interaction in the app.

X has been working on this since November last year, when it launched its new “NFL Portal” element, which is designed to make it easier for users to stay up to date with key discussions around live NFL matches.

As you can see in this example, the NFL Portal brings together posts from NFL teams, as well as key commentators, while also providing access to game schedules, live scores and stats.

X added the same for NBA matches in April this year:

And in the last week, X has also added some additional sports engagement elements, including updated share cards for sports games, and new score tracker notes on relevant posts.

I mean, maybe you wouldn’t want that, if you were hoping to catch the replay, but if you’re looking up the event hashtag, you’re likely fine with the score being spoiled.

X users can also dock conversations about a live match, so they can keep on top of the discussion while X’s video feed provides another means to share highlights in-stream.

X will be hoping that this enhanced focus on sports discussion will prompt more engagement, and keep its top sports communities from migrating to other platforms instead.

Because as noted, Meta’s making a push for this audience as well.

Meta already has a deal in place with the UFC, which will see exclusive, live content shared to Threads, while Threads now also has its own live score displays for in progress sporting events, which is a first step towards a similar game day hub like X.

Meta has also made a specific point of highlighting that sports discussion is rising fast in the app, with some sports-related communities growing by millions in a matter of months. And amid the recent NBA Finals fanfare, Threads also hosted a live chat with ESPN’s Malika Andrews to promote the event.

In combination, you can see how Threads is looking to make inroads with this key discussion element, as another effort to put pressure on X.

And given that sports is the biggest topic of discussion on X, that makes a lot of sense:

The fact that X is now looking to add more sports engagement elements, and fast, suggests that Threads likely is making some progress on this front, and building its own sports-based communities, causing engagement challenges for the app.

And if Threads can become more of a focal point for live sports discussion, that could fast become a major issue for Elon’s social media project, which now runs the risk of becoming a bigger version of Parler or Truth Social, where political discussion becomes the domineering focus of the app.

I suspect that many X users are not interested in such, but have largely been able to ignore it, in order to maintain their established sports communities. But if those groups start to fragment, and re-seed themselves on Threads instead, that could see a big chunk of X’s usage filter away over time.

I’d suggest that this is already happening, hence X’s rethink of its sports elements, and the broader stats which show a decline in X usage.

I also think that X is putting too much reliance on its Grok AI chatbot to drive engagement. Just this week, LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky noted that LinkedIn’s AI-generated post creation tools aren’t catching on as it had hoped they would, which could point to a broader shift away from AI as a creation tool.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s clearly value in AI for some elements, including analytics, ad targeting, product image generation, etc. But for personal, creative use, in regards to providing post text options, reimagining images, generating video, etc. I don’t think that there’s going to be as much value in these aspects, from a general user standpoint.

The risk then is that by making these tools more readily available in-stream, platforms will eventually become more and more inundated by AI slop, which will turn users away. You can already see this starting on TikTok, where AI-generated video posts (mostly created in Google Veo), lacking in originality or creativity, and are starting to overtake human-created content. Yet, it’s the human-created content that facilitates connection and engagement, because there’s nothing unique about animated video generated from a text prompt. Anyone can do it, with the only real differentiator being in the concept and the writing behind it. And standing out in that respect is much more difficult. 

X’s continued push on Grok could lead to the same, and it’ll be interesting to see how the platform looks to counter engagement losses with more features designed to enhance the user experience, in variance to this.

Because if X starts losing its key discussion groups, it’s going to lose, period.