I don't believe this X employee knew what they were talking about. • For You is an algorithm based section that is split at about 70/30 following/not following. The 70% for following, is usually older posts, and the 30% not following is where the algorithm is at play. It uses recent engagements; comments on topics, shares, etc. It doesn't care if you argue or disagree, just that you've engaged. So you'll see flat earth shit, Dem shit, rep shit, etc based on recent activities. It's like Tik Tok. But their FYP is about 15/85%. It updates in live time, because each screen refresh is a new video, unlike X, where it's posts and comments. • Following is where 100% of posts show up from accounts you follow, in chronological order. The issue people have with this section is the "dot of death". Why can't we infinitely scroll?? Because Twitter used data packs for their backend servers. You download a packet of data that contains tweets/rt. So accounts that follow 5000 other accounts, and mutes 10%, have 4500 accounts' worth of tweets trying to fit in a data pack. That user can scroll til they hit the dot, and be 2hours back. Am account that follows 200 accounts, can hit the dot and be 3 days back. It's account specific. Twitter wasn't a live feed system, which is why no comment editing or post editing. X introduced premium post editing within 1 hour, but it doesn't actually edit the original post. It creates a new one, and leaves the original within data packs with the tagline "there's a new version of this post". • With 100m+ daily users, with many creating 5-10 posts per day, that's a lot of accounts fighting to get into other people's FYP. But they're fighting for a 30% slot to accounts they don't follow them, and 70% slot of people that do. This is per post they make. Fyp won't have all of your posts on all fyp that fit within the criteria of the algorithm. But the big issue is that all of those hundreds of millions of posts fighting for those slots, have extreme limitations of the data packs. Go to your fyp and check out the first 20 posts. Who they're from, etc. Then refresh the page. It'll download a new data pack. Check out the first 20. It's different accounts/posts. Different times posted. So while "some" of what the X employee said could play a minor part in some accounts feeling shadow banned or throttled, it's not the reason large accounts start seeing less views. While your personal fyp is based on your own personal interests, the posts you're typing out that are fighting to be in other fyp pages have metrics to hit. If your posts have good engagement, from views to likes to comments, you'll get boosted. During that boost, if you continue to keep engagements above their metric line, your other posts will get boosted (boosted into fyp of interest based metrics). Over a span of time (could be 1 day, 1 week, 1 month), of engagement falls, the algorithm reads that as a symbol of "lack of interesting content", and starts deboosting your account. Instead of 20 of your best posts being in FYP of others, it'll drop it to 10. If things continue downward, it'll drop to 5, and so on. But if your new posts start climbing, you'll get boosted again. This is why accounts like Laura Loomer and accounts with a few mil followers will go 4 mo with high views, then they start making posts about "testing 123, trying to see who sees this cause the algorithm is broken". It's because during that 4mo, their engagement rates aren't stellar. Usually 1% or less of views to likes/comments/rt. It only takes 1 "hot post" for that account to get boosted again. That's when the new post "Thank you Elon, for fixing the algorithm!!" start coming in. Elon didn't fix anything. The algorithm played the game it was designed to play. I know this was an extremely long comment, and I apologize. But 99% of X users have no clue how X works and always blame Elon or the algorithm, instead.
