Stephen Cadigan

For what I believe is the next week, making images in @Kling_ai is free if you have a subscription. Excellent! And their new image model, Kolors 2.1, is out! I've already made a lot of images! 😅 Here's my prompt for this one: Two giant monsters fight each other in a city. #GenerativeAI #Godzilla

@karatademada I'm happy to post for free. But I want people to see it.

I see many people asking for X to end creator monetization. But let me ask you this: If monetization disappeared tomorrow, would you still keep posting here… or would you switch to another platform to earn revenue?

Okay, time to guess again!😄My guess for who is bringing out the torch for the Montreal Canadiens game tonight is Bob Gainey. Steve Shutt would be an amazing choice. I would love for it to be Chris Chelios. I'm sure whoever it is will be great!

@Artedeingenio @mitte_ai Incredible work!

This animation style keeps giving me so much joy. I couldn’t resist trying it with one of my favorite characters, Vampirella. There’s something fascinating about telling a story in less than 45 seconds. To create this video, I used @mitte_ai, the platform with the best prices for Seedance 2.0. 👉 If you’re interested, you’ll find a link in my bio.

Xhekaj needs to be playing for the Canadiens. The Hurricanes are going overboard running at Hutson and Dobeš.

@TonyMarinaro @thesickpodcasts It's wrong that you spoiled this for the Canadiens' fans.

C’est Claude Lemieux qui va porter le flambeau ce soir / Claude Lemieux will carry the torch tonight @thesickpodcasts

My guess for who is bringing out the torch for the Montreal Canadiens game tonight is Bob Gainey. Steve Shutt would be an amazing choice. I would love for it to be Chris Chelios. It was really wonderful to see Larry Robinson do it the last time.

@IamEmily2050 @Kling_ai Kling loves to blow a woman's hair when she's not moving. Sometimes even indoors! 😄

Kling 4K 9:16. a teenage girl in a navy sailor uniform sits on the end of a wooden pier, back to camera. pink and orange sunset, sun just above distant dark mountains, calm ocean with a thin bright reflection stretching toward camera. sky fades from warm orange near horizon to dusty purple above, soft clouds. hair and skirt move slightly in a light breeze. wooden planks in sharp focus in lower third. still composition, no cuts.

@NEXUS_TO_NOVA What did you use to make this video? It's an amazing job.

This video looked fine, but one tiny detail kept making it feel wrong.

Here are some explorers preparing to harness the sun's energy. I think they want to sell that power to Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, and Google for off-world AI data centers! 😄 I used Sora 2 to make this. I made this in the @vadooai CPP program.

@javilopen Hello everyone!

Can you reply this post?

Oliver Kapanen is taking the warm-up skate for the Montreal Canadiens. You know, the guy who received votes for rookie of the year. Finally!

The Montreal Canadiens and the Buffalo Sabres are the two youngest teams in the NHL playoffs. One of them will be eliminated tonight, and I realize it will be painful for those fans. But the future is bright! I need to keep that in mind, just in case... 😄

@javilopen Excellent work!

⚡ xAI dropped the X algorithm yesterday and I don't get why nobody noticed what's actually in there I burned $500 on Claude going through every single line Here's what I found (LONG POST, save it for later): 0/ Every account has an "embedding" attached to it that describes you the way AI models do: in latent space. It's the internal fingerprint the model keeps of every user, a vector of numbers that sums up how your account behaves (what topics you touch, what engagement you generate, who you interact with). The model uses it every time it decides who to show your posts to. If your history is good, it stays clean and the model pushes you. If you accumulate negative signals (blocks, mutes, reports, not_interested), it goes toxic and starts penalizing you automatically. And the trap: it does NOT reset. What you do today stays in there for weeks, poisoning everything you publish after, even if it's good. That's why getting out of a shadowban or a low-reach streak on X feels like trying to move a giant rusted wheel. It's not your imagination, it's literally that. Cleaning up your embedding is slow and painful, like the impression you have of someone you don't like: no matter how nice they get to you, it's gonna take a while before you trust them. Another important finding: the embedding doesn't decay on a clock. It decays with NEW engagement entering the system. If you stop posting, the old bad signals stay frozen in there. Nothing overwrites them. If you start making content the algorithm likes, you'd see improvement after 6 to 8 weeks and a real shift around 12 to 16 weeks, assuming you don't pile up more bad signals along the way. Why is nobody talking about this? It blows my mind. Finally a confirmation of that "I'm in a bad streak" feeling we've all been through. 1/ First 30 minutes are everything If your post doesn't get engagement fast, Grok doesn't even evaluate it. No quality score, no deep analysis, no chance of reaching anyone who doesn't follow you. Dead and buried 2/ Post age caps at 80 hours: POST_AGE_MAX_MINUTES = 4800, bucketed in 1 hour chunks. After that you're in the "overflow bucket" which translates to "ancient, ignore" Best window: first 0 to 12 hours. After 24 you're already in a worse bucket Far from rewarding "evergreen" content, X wants a constant stream of fresh meat (literally the opposite of YouTube) 3/ MY BIGGEST FEAR TURNED OUT TO BE UNFOUNDED (supposedly): living in EU posting English for US audience: ZERO direct penalty in theory: The PostCandidate struct has NO field for author country, IP, or location. Gizmoduck (X's identity service) returns only follower count + screen name. The Phoenix transformer just sees a hash of your author_id What hurts you indirectly: timezone (your post ages while US sleeps) and the language of the POST itself So using a VPN to "post from the US" does literally nothing (unlike TikTok or Instagram, by the way) 4/ The 5 negative signals that kill your reach: The model predicts 22 actions per post. 5 of them are negative weights that get SUBTRACTED from your score: - not_interested - block_author - mute_author - report - not_dwelled (people scrolling past your post without stopping) That last one is brutal tbh. A post that gets ignored is mathematically WORSE than a post that never got published 5/ Shadowbans 100% exist. 4 different kinds: - Hard drop. X removes your post from everyone's feed without telling you. Applied to posts with serious content (child safety, etc.) or suspended accounts. You don't even find out - DO_NOT_AMPLIFY label. Literally a field in the code that says "do not amplify this post". If they put it on you, ads stop showing next to your posts → X stops making money from showing you → the system stops pushing you. Full blackout - BotMaker rules. The internal panel where X employees can manually limit a specific account by hand. The code shows the categories that exist (Content, ContentLimited, Safety, Grok) but does NOT show who they're applied to or why. The tool is documented, the usage isn't - Poisoned embedding. The worst one, as we saw above. The model has an internal "memory" for every account. If your account racks up enough "not interested" + blocks + mutes + reports over time, that memory goes toxic. From then on, even your good future posts get penalized automatically. Nobody decided this. The model just learned your account gets bad engagement and self-corrected 6/ Only ORIGINAL posts get the "Banger Screen" Replies and retweets never enter the Grok quality classifier. If you spend your day replying to viral accounts, you're optimizing for the Reply Ranker, NOT for amplification Want to be discovered out of network? Write originals. There's no other way 7/ Replies to small accounts get spam-scanned. Replies to big accounts get Grok-ranked Two separate classifiers. The SpamEapiLowFollowerClassifier hits replies to small accounts. The ReplyRanker scores replies to big accounts 0 to 3 with Grok "First!" or emoji-only replies get a 0. "Sir, this is a Wendy's" energy gets penalized. Basically, if you write replies, they better add something. Otherwise don't bother 8/ 50% of all feed requests are "shadow traffic" is_sampled(request_id, 0.5) marks half of every feed request as shadow. Many context features (gender inference, demographics, Grok topic preferences) only activate on shadow OR with a feature flag Translation: you literally cannot know which version of the algorithm any given user is getting. Half your audience is in an experiment at any moment 9/ Dwell (the time a user spends looking at your post before scrolling) is 5x better than getting likes The scorer has 5 different dwell signals (dwell, cont_dwell_time, click_dwell_time, etc.) but only 1 favorite signal. - A post with tons of likes but people read it for 1 second and keep scrolling → low score - A post with few likes but people stay 8 seconds reading it → high score Optimize for time spent on your post, not for likes! 10/ Things that actually work: - Get engagement in the first 10 min. DM your friends, ping your community, whatever - Post in your AUDIENCE'S timezone, not yours. US targeting: 8 to 11am ET (14 to 17 Madrid time) - Don't post 5 things in a row. AuthorDiversityScorer multiplies each next post by decay^position. By post 4 you're at the floor - Video ≥ 10 seconds. Below MinVideoDurationMs you lose the full VQV weight - Videos with audio. Grok runs ASR (speech to text) on every video. No audio = blank signal - Quote tweet virals in your niche. The model already knows the original engages, your value-add stacks on top 11/ Things that absolutely kill your reach: - WILD FINDING: threads of 10+ tweets. DedupConversationFilter keeps only 1 tweet per conversation per feed. Megathreads are mathematically a waste - Reposting the same content. Bloom filters dedupe it - AI slop. There's literally a slop_score field in the BangerScreen output. They explicitly detect it - NSFW/violence/hate without tags. Auto MediumRisk = no ads = structural shadowban - Reply-spamming small accounts. Specific classifier for that 12/ What they DIDN'T release, the sneaky bastards: The skeleton is public. The dials are not - Exact numeric values of every weight (FavoriteWeight, ReplyWeight, OonWeightFactor, AuthorDiversityDecay). Live in xai_feature_switches::Params, external config - The actual Grok prompts (the 7 PToS policy prompts, BangerMiniVlmScreenScore, SafetyPtos). Could literally have any framing in them - The BotMaker rules that apply DO_NOT_AMPLIFY to specific accounts - util/phoenix_request.rs, which constructs the final model call - 25+ xai_* crates referenced but not included - The production Phoenix weights. They only released the mini version My theory: they gave us a pretty skinny skeleton of the whole thing they actually have. The muscle (weights) and the brain (prompts and BotMaker rules) are completely opaque. They kept the best parts for themselves, clearly 13/ Cheat sheet so you don't forget: - First 30 min matter more than anything - Your location is irrelevant, your timing and language are not - Shadowbans exist in 4 flavors. Worst is the model quietly poisoning your author embedding from past bad signals. Climbing back up by cleaning your embedding is gonna hurt, but it can be done - Replies and retweets don't get the quality classifier. Originals do - Dwell (someone actually staying to look at your post) beats likes 5 to 1 - Half of all traffic is in some experiment at any moment - They kept the best parts of the algorithm for themselves, but hey, something is something

@GHT120 He can sit in the seat next to Madame Béliveau. That will have to do for him! 😄

@StephenCadigan Gaston Gingras

My guess for who is bringing out the torch for the Montreal Canadiens game tonight is Bob Gainey. Larry Robinson or Steve Shutt would also be amazing. Guy Carbonneau was an excellent choice. Everyone they've used has won the Stanley Cup, so that might mean no Carey Price.

@GHT120 The list of choices is big but not that big! 😉

@StephenCadigan I'm hoping for Serge Boisvert 😉

Here's some giant monsters fighting each other in Tokyo, Japan. I used Sora 2 to make this. I'm glad Sora is still around! It did a beautiful job. I made this in the @vadooai CPP program.

@RichSilver I completely agree with you.

I’ve been creating on X for about three years now. Not just casually posting here and there. I mean actually trying to build something here. Trying to grow an account. Trying to understand the platform. Trying to become a better creator. Trying different niches, different content formats, different posting styles, different strategies. Trying to figure out where I fit in. And after three years of doing this, I think the best way I can describe the current state of X from a creator’s perspective is this: 🥳X is one of the most exciting platforms in the world... ...but it is also one of the most exhausting platforms to build on. 😫 There is so much potential here. That’s why I’m still here. That’s why a lot of us are still here. But there is also a real thing I would call X fatigue. It’s not just burnout from posting too much. It’s not just being tired of social media. It’s the fatigue that comes from trying to build on a platform that keeps changing underneath your feet. • The rules change. • The algorithm changes. • The monetization program changes. • The features change. • The formats being rewarded change. • The thing that worked last month suddenly stops working. • The thing that got ignored last month suddenly becomes the thing everyone is being told to do. And as a creator, you are expected to adapt instantly. You can have a period where your account feels like it’s finally starting to work. Your posts are moving. Your audience is growing. Your engagement is healthy. Your payouts make sense. You start thinking, “Okay, I’m figuring this out.” Then suddenly something changes. • Your reach drops. • Your engagement falls off. • Your payouts disappear. • Your posts stop moving. • Your followers slow down. • Your account starts feeling invisible. And the hardest part is that you often don’t know why. • Did your content get worse? • Did the algorithm change? • Did the monetization formula change? • Did the platform start rewarding a different format? • Did your niche fall out of favor? • Did your account lose some kind of invisible distribution signal? • Are people just not interested anymore? There is no clear answer. So you do what creators always do. ⚙️You grind harder. You post more. You experiment more. You try articles. You try video. You try short posts. You try long posts. You try Grok. You try Grok Imagine. You try going more niche. You try going broader. You try being more personal. You try being more useful. You try being more entertaining. You try everything. And sometimes it works for a few days..... Then the game changes again. That is what creates X Fatigue. It’s the feeling that nothing lasts. It’s the feeling that every win has an expiration date. It’s the feeling that you can never really pause, because if you take a break, your account loses momentum, your engagement drops off a cliff, and when you come back you’re basically climbing out of a pit again. 🥊For creators, that is a brutal environment. I say all of this as someone who still believes in X. I believe in the mission. I believe in the idea of the everything app. I believe X can be more than just a social media platform. I believe Grok and xAI can become deeply tied into the future of creation. I believe X can be a place for news, commentary, art, entertainment, education, live video, AI content, long-form writing, communities, payments, and real-time conversation. *But believing in X does not mean pretending everything is perfect. And right now, I think a lot of creators feel like we’ve been holding up the platform for years while the platform keeps asking us to trust the next change, the next update, the next program, the next contest, the next payout cycle, the next algorithm. At some point, creators need more than a carrot in front of them. • We need stability. • We need clarity. • We need trust. • We need to know that if we keep showing up and producing original, valuable content, there is a real path forward.

@JorgeJimenezArt Congratulations Jorge! I'm a big fan of your work. I have this as a @CandyDigital NFT.

Batman has been nominated for Eisner Award for Best New Series! I'm speechless. I'm so happy, the whole team is, Matt, Tomeu, Rob...everyone!! This is something very special and very cool! :) Thanks to the Eisner Awards, and THANKS to the Batman fans! 🙌🙌❤️