Ian Miles Cheong@ianmiles
Post too much on X and the algorithm will kill your account. Post too little? Same result. It's not a bug in the design. It's the design.
Scroll through your timeline and look at what's missing. Verified accounts with millions of followers like OANN, The Guardian, Forbes, legacy outlets you actively follow. They haven't surfaced on your feed in months. It's not because they stopped posting. They post constantly. That's the problem.
X's algorithm doesn't care how many followers you have. It cares how your recent posts performed. When accounts post at high volume and most of those posts don't hit engagement thresholds, the algorithm flags them as low quality. From that point forward, everything you publish is penalized for the posts that underperformed before it. The model has already decided you don't deserve reach.
Followers don't matter on X.
Your followers don't see your posts unless they go out of their way to find them, interact with your account repeatedly, or happen to be in someone else's engagement orbit. Who you follow doesn't matter either. The algorithm assigns zero weight to the follow graph. You could have a million followers or a hundred but if your posts don't hit the thresholds, the reach is the same.
Try this: interact with a non-follower a couple of times. Like their posts, reply, maybe quote-tweet them. Within an hour, they'll show up on your feed more often than anyone you've actually chosen to follow. Maybe even sooner than that. The accounts you explicitly follow matter less than strangers you've clicked on twice. That's the hierarchy. That's what the algorithm is optimizing for.
Imagine opening YouTube, subscribing to a stack of woodworking channels, and getting fed nothing but Skibidi Toilet fan videos because the algorithm decided to spaz out that day. YouTube doesn't work like that because it wasn't designed to. X's algorithm does, because it was.
It doesn't care what you follow. It cares what will most likely produce engagement, from anyone, for any reason.
And there's a massive audience for the worst possible content. AI-generated footage of children trapped in warzones. Police bodycam shootings. Clips of Clavicular getting mogged by a homeless bum. This is the slop, and it dominates the feed not because most users love it but because enough users can't stop looking.
The accounts posting this content are almost all automated. Not hundreds. There are tens of thousands of them. You don't see the ones that flop. You only see the one that hit. And the hit is statistically inevitable: when you have ten thousand accounts posting variations of the same engagement bait every hour, one of them will go viral. Law of large numbers. The algorithm doesn't have to choose slop. It just has to reward whatever wins. And slop wins by volume.
Behind these accounts are literal factories. Warehouses of Android phones running jailbroken software that emulates different devices, posting on rotation, manufacturing the engagement signals the algorithm is designed to chase. It's real. And it's scaling.
Creators who post real work — who don't run device farms, who don't chain-post engagement bait, who actually care about what they publish — get buried underneath the slop. They don't lose to better content. They lose to volume.
And once the algorithm has formed an opinion about your account, there's no way out. The model is predictive. Your recent history determines your future reach. If your last ten posts underperformed, your eleventh starts with a reach penalty regardless of how good it is. You could write the best thing you've ever written. If the algorithm has flagged you, nobody will see it.
"Bangers" don't exist for demoted accounts. They die in silence like everything else.
This is the death spiral. If you have a small friend circle, or you post across a range of topics, or your content happened to take a bad statistical week, you can end up permanently throttled. No notification. No path to appeal. You just disappear. Most of your followers won't even notice you stopped showing up.
Between the death spiral and the factory farms, X isn't just failing its creators. It's training its users to expect worse content and its best posters to give up and leave. You can feel it already. The for-you feed is trending toward a lowest common denominator nobody actively chose. The algorithm is eating the platform.
This kills accounts.
And eventually, it kills X.
