Todd LeComte

I Was Wrong About Nikita… and I’m Eating Crow This Morning Good Morning World!!! I’m in shock. Not the dramatic kind where a Victorian woman faints onto a chaise lounge while someone fans her with smelling salts. More the kind where you stare at your phone, refresh the page three times, and wonder if you somehow opened The Onion by mistake. Because this morning I discovered that the amazingly talented @cfryant has FINALLY been reinstated after being suspended for eleven months. Eleven months. That is long enough to grow a human baby, train for a marathon, build a decent sourdough starter, or watch every season of a show you hate just so you can complain about it online. And now I have to eat a little crow. Which I hate. Crow is not nearly as tasty as humble pie. And humble pie already tastes like burnt toast and poor decision making. As most of you know, when Nikita first became Head of Product I was actually excited. I know. Try not to laugh. His resume looked impressive. I thought maybe, just maybe, we were finally getting someone who understood social media and the role smaller creators play in the ecosystem. The plankton that feed the whales. The ants that hold up the picnic. The people who actually make the platform interesting while the big accounts argue about politics. Unfortunately, that enthusiasm lasted about as long as a New Year’s resolution at a donut convention. Pretty quickly Nikita started making big sweeping statements that felt like classic employment rage bait. The kind that makes half the creators spit out their coffee and type “EXCUSE ME SIR?” Statements designed to irritate everyone equally. Which, to be fair, is technically a growth strategy. Meanwhile, a lot of employees in the program seem to be doing very well monetizing those reactions. Some yank our chains. Some ask engagement-bait questions like “What features should we add?” Wonderful in theory… if they had any power to implement them. At some point I learned that employees themselves were monetized in the program. That was the moment I quietly decided to stop engaging with them on principle. Except for Smoke. Smoke was obviously a creator first and foremost. I was a fan before he got hired at X and I’m still a fan now that he has been let go. For anyone wondering, he’s recovering from surgery, still unable to move around much, and his mom has been giving sporadic updates. I’m continuing to pray for a full and speedy recovery. Because despite all the chaos around here, this community still actually cares about each other. But I digress. Back to Nikita. For a while things went from questionable to confusing. The 10K bonus. The Bangers Awards. Both ended up rewarding a shocking amount of stolen content. It felt like showing up to a marathon only to watch the trophies get handed to people who took an Uber. And that stung. Especially for creators who had poured their hearts and souls into original content because they believed in the platform. Then there’s the blocking. Nikita has become famous for blocking people who ask questions in the comments. At this point being blocked by him is practically its own achievement badge. Congratulations. You’ve unlocked Level 7: Product Manager Awareness. But over the past couple of months something has clearly shifted. I’m willing to say that publicly. He’s been less vague and more direct. Instead of the rage-bait shitposting that used to send half the platform into a caffeine-fueled panic, he’s pointing at specific nonsense and saying, “That. That right there is why you aren’t getting paid.” And then actually suspending accounts. Left. Right. Up. Down. Sideways. It’s starting to look like the algorithm version of a yard cleanup. Every cheater who gets removed means more revenue stays in the pool for the creators actually doing the work. Which brings us to Christopher. This morning I woke up and saw that @cfryant has been reinstated. And I cannot explain how demoralizing it has been watching eleven months go by while wave after wave of other “creators” got brought back. Christopher has always been about the art, not the views. If the platform were a grocery store, he’d be filet mignon. Calling him spam is like calling the Mona Lisa clip art. He and his girlfriend Cate ran the Collaboration Station community. The kind of place that actually wanted artists to collaborate, encourage each other, and build things together. In other words, the exact opposite of the spammy nonsense that tends to take over social platforms. Christopher mostly shrugged the suspension off. He wasn’t making much from monetization anyway. But I kept pushing. He was at the top of every reinstatement list I submitted. Nothing. I tried again after the Coca-Cola commercial. Still nothing. Then again after the xAI commission. He finally got a response after that, permanently suspended for spam. The other day I suggested he DM Nikita. Instead, Christopher surprised me. He wrote a public post and tagged him. Nikita responded. And Christopher is back. Now look. I can only imagine how many tags and DMs Nikita gets every single day. But the fact that he reversed a bad call shows real accountability. Fixing mistakes matters. And that deserves to be acknowledged. Now if he can just stop accidentally causing mass panic with statements like “Should we get rid of Communities?” we might all sleep a little better at night. Today I’m happy. Happy for Christopher. Happy for artists. Hopeful that fairness might actually be making a comeback. If you’re an original content creator, come check out the Creators of X (COX)community where we support each other in meaningful ways instead of just screaming into the algorithm and hoping it notices. Turns out creators do better when we help each other instead of fighting over the last breadcrumb the algorithm dropped on the floor. Thanks for reading. Thanks for sharing. And remember… sharing is caring. And a special thank you to all of my subscribers who chip in $2 a month to keep me in coffee and the kids in snacks. You may think you’re just buying me coffee, but you’re actually funding the daily chaos that is my brain every morning. The kids appreciate the snacks. I appreciate the caffeine. And together we somehow keep this little corner of the internet alive. Have a great day, and may the algorithm always be in your favor.

Apple introduced the AirPods Max 2, upgrading its over-ear headphones with more powerful noise cancellation and a handful of features that have already rolled out to the AirPods Pro line in recent years. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…