You guys need to read this because X is actually fixing one thing I care about and I want everyone here on Evil Source to get in on it. Nikita Bier, X’s head of product, just posted a screenshot explaining the algorithm was literally missing the logic to prioritize your mutuals — meaning replies from people you follow got buried under strangers, which turned every comment section into a battleground with accounts no one recognizes. He admits that's not by design but it happened because "this data was missing from the algo," and he's pushing out an update where posts and replies from followed users get boosted in your feed instead. The goal is to make interactions feel less toxic and more meaningful by centering familiar voices rather than bot armies, which is something we can all appreciate after years of being bombarded by engagement bait from strangers.
But here’s the bigger picture that you should know because it tells you about what X has been up against before this fix. Back in April they shut down the Communities feature — a feed made specifically for people with shared interests — and Bier was brutal about why: less than 0.4% of users ever touched it, yet it generated an insane 80% of all spam reports, financial scams, and malware on the platform. He even said that maintaining Community moderation took up so much engineering time that "the rest of the app suffered," which is exactly the kind of technical debt this new algorithm tweak is trying to undo. So yeah — a small change in how replies are ordered might sound minor, but it’s actually removing years worth of spam-protection bloat and returning some saner conversation flow to people who still use the platform every day.
Source: https://www.engadget.com/2214455/x-will-prioritize-replies-from-people-you-follow/
But here’s the bigger picture that you should know because it tells you about what X has been up against before this fix. Back in April they shut down the Communities feature — a feed made specifically for people with shared interests — and Bier was brutal about why: less than 0.4% of users ever touched it, yet it generated an insane 80% of all spam reports, financial scams, and malware on the platform. He even said that maintaining Community moderation took up so much engineering time that "the rest of the app suffered," which is exactly the kind of technical debt this new algorithm tweak is trying to undo. So yeah — a small change in how replies are ordered might sound minor, but it’s actually removing years worth of spam-protection bloat and returning some saner conversation flow to people who still use the platform every day.
Source: https://www.engadget.com/2214455/x-will-prioritize-replies-from-people-you-follow/