Ian Miles Cheong@ianmiles
The X algorithm is broken, and it's killing the platform from the inside out.
It's gotten measurably worse, and it now barely registers something as fundamental as how many people chose to follow you. Small accounts can't grow organically. Large accounts watch their reach collapse month over month. Post too much and you're throttled. Post too little and you're forgotten. There is no winning move because the system isn't designed for anyone to win.
It's designed to keep everyone anxious, posting more, and dependent on whatever the model decided that morning.
I'm personally down 95% from a year ago. Ninety-five percent. I get more views and replies on Instagram with 20,000 followers than I do here with a following many multiples of that. Every serious creator, journalist, and news account I know is reporting the same collapse. This isn't a handful of cranks complaining but a structural failure visible in the numbers across the entire creator class.
The damage runs deeper than impressions. The algorithm has quietly redefined what kind of person you're allowed to be on this platform. If you stay relentlessly inside one "niche," you get rewarded. If you post like an actual human being with multiple interests — politics, tech, gaming, culture, memes — you get punished. The system literally works against diversity of thought, which is supposed to be the entire point of a town square. It funnels everyone into narrower and narrower lanes until creators stop being people and start being content categories.
The user experience is just as broken as the creator experience. Imagine subscribing to a dozen tech and science channels on YouTube and being shown unrelated slop instead. That's the For You feed now. Most of the accounts on my timeline are random accounts I never asked to see, while the people I actually chose to follow get buried.
The "systems-first" approach the team is so proud of has turned a social network into a slot machine and the engagement numbers everyone is whispering about in group chats prove the experiment isn't working.
Here's the part nobody at X seems willing to say out loud: followers used to be social capital, and the algorithm has retroactively devalued every account on the platform. All of us, aside from the legacy celebrities who arrived with audiences pre-built, clawed our way up from zero. We posted through the woke years, the bot waves, the policy changes, the verification chaos. We built something. And then one day a model decided our followers don't really count anymore. Treating creators this way is the digital equivalent of how communist regimes treat entrepreneurs: confiscate the value they built, redistribute it to whoever the central planner prefers this week, and call it fairness.
It also makes no business sense. Creators are not a cost center on this platform — we are the platform. The reason anyone opens the app is because someone they want to hear from is here. When you suppress that signal in favor of algorithmic guesses, you don't just hurt creators — you train users to leave.
People are already migrating their best work to Substack, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, where follower relationships still mean something. X is speedrunning the same mistake every dying platform makes: confusing engagement metrics with actual loyalty.
The fix isn't complicated:
Give us back a real Following feed that respects the explicit choice users made when they hit the follow button. Let the For You tab handle discovery — that's its job — but stop overriding the social graph people built deliberately. Make follower count weight something meaningful again. Stop punishing topical range. Stop boosting unverified randoms over accounts users have actively opted into. And stop pretending an opaque ranking model is more legitimate than the user's own stated preferences.
X is supposed to be the free speech platform. But suppression by algorithm is still suppression — it just has better PR. If the team is serious about this being a town square, the people who showed up and built it deserve to actually be heard by the audiences they earned.
Fix the algorithm. Give followers back their meaning. Let creators be human again.
