Chaps

it's pretty clear that the new algorithm is destroying the platform and the people in charge wont realise until it's too late because the method of action is more insidious. the real reason is that the team internally thinks they are building reddit instead of 4chan; which is to say they do not understand who their user base of creators is nor which diaspora of internet people they are serving. you can see this across a few of the moves that were made the past year; an obsession with the 'front page' [a very reddit concept] and a tight curating of which posting styles can reach it. the failed official X Bangers account gave us a window into the brains of the product team and what posts they see as "high quality posting". nearly all of the posts included were slop which appealed to the lowest common denominator—the lowest common denominator being where the variable they're optimising for [unregretted user minutes] is being wasted. the metrics used to measure success are lying. initiatives and incentivisation like this has driven posting behaviour to become derivative of the same slop; cynical commentary that's divorced of personality—open the for you page, fixate less on each post's content but more on the overall post structure, and you will see that it's mostly some permutation of: < elon glazing post > < satirical quote tweet on some news event > < we hate men/women because > < something MAGA > < the current trending topic e.g. vibe coding > < maybe a couple of posts from your specific network or set of interests > this is the exact same thing that is being shoveled to users every single day. it is becoming stale, and the way that commentary is structured [in order to go viral] has become homogenous to the point where every viral post follows a specific written formula; it's similar to a new age RW version of 'reddit-speak', one which will eventually (and already does) trigger visceral disgust when read as it continues to be optimized to its final state. if X was a news app this would all be fine, but it's not, it's an anon forum of interconnected subnetworks. the old algorithm was structured this way; first you must go viral within your cluster, once that is achieved, you must go viral within adjacent clusters, until it hits the for you page. this made more sense because posting quality was vetted by those most adjacent to said interest that you were posting in, ensuring that the post was worthy of being pushed to a wider audience and had real substance, instead of the new algorithm which reduces to 'will the lowest common denominator find this interesting'. having a 'front page' isn't intuitively a bad concept—it's a good thing—but when you think about reddit [ignoring the 'karma-whoring' front page chasing that aided in rotting the platform], there was actually some escape from the front page in the form of subreddits. X completely hides real "communities" (the underlying network graph, not the ad-hoc feature that doesn't work) and with recent social/algorithmic changes, this has death spiraled to the point where from the perspective of power users most of the network graphs have dissolved....this should be more alarming to X staff but the comment from nikita and misdefining of a particular network (CT) tells you how this isn't even a subconscious thought of how the underlying system works. 4chan had the exact same clustering in the form of segmented image boards, and it's why after 4chan mostly died most of the higher quality posters migrated to X; they stuck because the X algorithm ~functionally segmented into these same boards. continuing to alienate these types of users will cause the platform to devolve into recycled and regurgitated 'bangers' and formulaic posting which is already happening. there isn't necessarily a huge amount that nikita is doing algorithmically wrong, it's a cultural issue and the obsession with the front page of X that's systemically driving behaviour and as a second order effect dissolving these underlying network clusters. understandably X is trying to shift more towards an interest graph to cast a wider net, the issue that needs to be addressed is that majority of the high quality posters that underpin the platform are in it for the social graph. when you start optimising around variables that lack context you start draining the lifeblood out of the platform and all that will be left is a husk. this type of death is more insidious than those driven by scandals or a handicapped engineering team. there are still some solutions like allowing users to manually switch between different open-sourced algorithms or letting them prompt their own algorithm to tweak it towards what they prefer. the cynic in me says they've already A/B tested this and found it hurts some of the variables they're optimising for which is why it's been a neglected thought since the elon takeover.