The For You page is killing Social

My kingdom for a chronological feed

X leadership has been publicly struggling with two incompatible goals: optimizing attention and time spent on the platform on the one hand, and tight creator-follower linkage on the other. These goals are mutually exclusive, and so far, X has opted for the former: chasing KPIs like user time spent on the platform.

This has come at the expense of what I call “creator-follower linkage”, which means the following properties:

• Creators being able to consistently reach their audience

• Consumers being able to reliably hear from creators they want to follow

• Permitting the existence of opt-in filter bubbles like Crypto Twitter

In other words, we are witnessing the triumph of “X globalization” over “X as a collection of individual niches”. Even Elon has noticed this with dismay. Elon is a fan and a user of X after all. Elon the X user is in conflict with Elon the X owner.

The important thing to understand is that you can’t serve two masters. Either creators and users are tightly linked, or the platform algorithmically serves users an array of compelling content. You can’t have both, and this is why X feels like it’s achieving neither right now.

How this happened

This transition has been effectuated in a few specific ways. First, leadership made specific UX choices, like defaulting users into the For You as opposed to the Following page. Even within Following, users are generally defaulted into Popular rather than Recent sort. So as a user, to get back to an ordinary chronological timeline, you have to consciously beat two different dark patterns, every time you log in. (Footnote: I’m aware that in some cases, selecting Following and Recent “sticks” and you don’t have to re-select it every time you open the app or the tab. But lately I’ve noticed that every new session defaults you to For You. I actually installed an extension to disable this on desktop.)

For You presents you with an AI-curated feed of stuff Grok thinks you will like, oftentimes posted by people you don’t follow. I specifically avoid For You because it tends to be content that sucks you in, like culture war content, excessively partisan takes, or clips of violence or disorder. (Footnote: obviously I’m aware that I built my own algo brick by brick, and my FYP looks very different from that of a socialist artist living in Seattle)

Because I use X for work (monitoring and participating in Crypto Twitter), I actually don’t want to spend excessive amounts of time on the platform engaging in pointless arguments, so For You is actually contrary to my goals.

But it definitely has the desired effect even at the micro level – increasing user time and attention.

The other way in which X has steered the platform is through deliberate changes to the algorithm. They recently open sourced parts of it allowing us to better understand their design choices. Many of these things we had already intuited, but it was helpful to concretely see what they are trying to do with the new algorithm. The way it works is as follows:

• Early on, your posts are shown to a fraction of your followers and a sample of non-followers

• If the post performs with those cohorts, it goes to more of your followers and more out of network users

• If it keeps doing well, it gets onto For You pages and can go potentially megaviral (100k favs, 1m impressions, etc)

This means that instead of getting predictable reach, most of your posts die in utero, but each one has a small chance to go super big. Of course, this isn’t what creators want. I personally want to consistently reach my own followers, and no one else. They matter to me, and my content is crafted for them specifically. I don’t really care about going megaviral (even though many of my posts do), because the normie audience isn’t what I’m after, and they don’t convert to in-niche followers. So for me as a creator, I would much rather predictably reach my own cohort rather than roll the dice and have a 1/50 chance of getting 1m+ impressions among the normie crowd.

This is a bad outcome, arguably, for everyone. Creators are incentivized to craft content that plays well to a normie audience, rather than their traditional bespoke niche. Performing strongly within your niche doesn’t seem to matter as much anymore, and it seems to be the blessing of the randomly selected out of sample group that matters.

The beauty of X is the fact that it was a loose collection of filter bubbles, and you could get extremely high quality discussion within different cohorts, whether political, technical, or cultural. Creators could only focus on a specific niche (like me with CT) and users within those niches would be reliably served content they wanted to see. Now creators are incentivized (both financially and with impressions) to normify their content and forsake their niches. Since you aren’t rewarded for building a big audience any more, some creators are simply leaving the platform and opting to build more reliable audiences on Substack, where they can actually get in front of their followers’ eyeballs. The de-filter-bubble-ization of X has effectively killed off many extremely popular niches, like CT. Someone who previously came here to learn only about their specific sub-subniche is now served gas station fistfights and politicians subtweeting each other.

A related problem is the penalization of posting links that lead users out of the platform. This of course makes sense from X’s perspective – you don’t want users to spend their time elsewhere – but it vastly reduces the ability of creators to publish and promote longform content on X. I have dealt with this problem acutely over the last couple years, since I deal primarily in longform, and have experimented with different solutions, like posting natively in Article format (what I’m doing here). But that hasn’t led to predictable outcomes, so I have chosen instead to cultivate a Substack audience who I know I can reliably reach. My Substacks are opened by 50% of the people who receive them in their email inbox. That’s exceptional. How many of my followers are served, let alone open, an Article I publish on X?

My 3000 followers on Substack are worth more to me than my 400k followers on X, because I know I can consistently reach half of them

These algorithmic changes are not a great outcome for ordinary users either, because they may want to be served unpopular or extremely niche content from specific accounts that they have chosen to follow, but these posts simply don’t appear on their feeds any more, because they aren’t blessed by the algorithm. Unless you tediously select Following and Recent every time you open a session, or use Lists. But most people don’t have the patience to do that.

Even though these algorithmic changes combined with UX choices which push users towards For You page clearly do lead to increased time spent on the platform, as Nikita Bier’s posts reveal, this feels more like a temporary high than it does a sustainable business model. Virtually anyone you talk to feels like the X algo has gotten worse, even if they are spending more time on X. Large X creators are more frustrated than ever and many, like me, are choosing to build their audience on more reliable platforms with consistent reach, like Substack. If you lose the high quality creators who like to post links and longform, directly reach their followers, and you’re left only with ragebait or culture war accounts, you are losing the soul of X. This is too subtle, I think, to be captured in the KPI numbers, but it’s real.

Why this happened

Pushing users towards algorithmic, rather than chronological feeds, is like doping in cycling. If you don’t do it, you’ll lose to everyone else that does. Virtually every other social platform, with some exceptions, uses some variant of FYP. Threads, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, even Snapchat and Linkedin use algorithmic or discovery feeds.

So if X doesn’t do it, users will compare the experience of using the platform to the excitement and nonstop engagement of their experiences on TT or IG. I don’t actually blame X leadership for doing this, but I think they’re optimizing the wrong KPIs.

X is special and different because it really is the free speech app – none of the others are even remotely as permissive as X – and it’s the place where dialogue happens, including at the very top levels. It feels like the global town square while also giving you a (hidden but very real) experience of swimming in your own pond. It achieves this without forcing users to opt into highly specialized subreddits.

While the numbers might warrant it, pushing users into algorithmic feeds and feeding them engaging but low-quality slop degrades the value of the platform long term. It turns off creators who feel like they are being deprived of access to their own, valuable follower bases that they’ve spent years building. It turns off creators who like to post long-form or have erudite, fact-driven discussions with plenty of outlinks. And it ruins a lot of ordinary users’ experience of using the app by pushing them into ragebait or culture war slop, rather than letting them see the niche, interesting content that they are used to.

In the next few years, I expect we will see a reactionary movement away from feeds, back towards predictability. This will be effectively a “digital property rights” movement, which will demand the following:

• Total algorithmic transparency and the ability to “choose your algorithm”. This will include freely opting in to different light touch or heavy touch moderation frameworks

• The right, as a creator, to not be arbitrarily deprived of your reach (to your followers), and to face “due process” as far as shadowbans or deboosting are concerned

• The right as a follower to receive posts from the people you have chosen to follow, and the ability to save and transport your social graph should you choose to

In the coming years, society will acknowledge that these digital property rights are just as real as physical ones. And we will come to accept that the value of your little homestead on a digital landscape is real, and you shouldn’t be arbitrarily deprived of the fruits of your labor just because the algorithm changed. I do believe that a platform will eventually come along which enshrines these principles and offers users predictable and fair treatment. And I hope that the Slop Singularity, which we are quickly approaching on X, will convince us that this is a system worth building.