Hi Elon. It’s about X.
I’ve been meaning to talk with you for a while, ever since I recently first started using X-formerly-known-as-Twitter.
The thing is, X is in many ways a very promising young platform. I really want it to succeed. But, there is an issue.
It’s not about the free speech thing. I personally like the direction you have set for it, in fact, it is a big reason I wanted to start using X, having eschewed social media for decades.
No, there is one major, existential-threat level issue with X: Content quality. Hear me out.
The actual feed works pretty well. It quickly learns what I like, and I have options to help train it. The problem is the threads. This is where user participation and interaction happens. It’s what makes X a social platform, it’s what makes it interesting. Without threads, X is just another dumb news/blog aggregator. So this is important. Unfortunately, threads on X suck. They suck tennis balls through a garden hose. They are YouTube level bad. Take any popular post, and invariably the replies are an append-only list of unsorted, unfiltered garbage. Pointless to read, and even more pointless to try to contribute to.
Making this particularly frustrating is, that this is not an impossible problem to solve. Other services already have. A well-known example is Reddit. While Reddit is its own special category of fail, and has done its best to try to kill itself for the last many years, there is one reason it is still a top destination for community discussion: If I make a good comment, it gets visibility. All the top comments are good. Why doesn’t this work on X? If I make a good comment on X, it just gets buried with all the other trash. A new user will only try that a couple of times, and then give up. This is poison for X long term.
There’s a thing that services like Reddit do, to make sure good content gets the visibility it deserves. It might already have a name, but I call this ’piloting’. Like a pilot episode of a new TV show, new posts are always shown with high visibility to a limited group of other users. If the post gets positive attention (upvotes or hearts or whatever), the post gets higher ’global’ visibility, i.e. it appears higher for all users. If they continue to promote it, it eventually floats to where it should be, compared with other posts. When done right, it works very well.
I am sure X already tries to do some of this, but it clearly does not work. X is currently failing as a social platform, this is the reason, and it should concern the hell out of you. You can only burn users so many times before they give up. There’s an argument to be made that the favoring of posts from blue-check accounts makes this problem worse (quality should be the top criterion, also, you probably want new users to have a good experience, so they, you know, buy a blue checkmark), but even setting that aside, the algorithm could work so much better. Simply catching up to early 2000s state-of-the-art would be a massive improvement at this point.
X could do so much better. Please fix it Elon. For humanity.
P.S.: I posted this on X, but no one on X will probably ever know.