X is about to change in a very important way

Elon Musk has announced a very important change that’s coming to X. The algorithm that determines what you see on your timeline (particularly the ‘For You’ feed), will be changed.

The change will aim to make the user experience a more positive one, promoting more informational/entertaining content.

For anyone who has a decent following they’ll be familiar with the wide variety of the replies you get on a post. Many of these posts are low quality, from accounts with numbers in the username, meaning that someone has signed up to post/reply on X, without thought about their profile, often these accounts are intentionally burner accounts why leverage anonymity to spread hate.

I’ll be really keen to see this algorithm update in place and while I already love the time I spend on X, there are times where the negativity can negatively impact your mood and you leave the platform questioning the time spent there.

Musk also flags that goal is to maximise unregretted user-seconds (and I’m sure minutes and hours). He goes on to say too much negativity is being pushed.

Robert Scoble, @Scobleizer also flagged in an X Space that advertisers also don’t love having their brand next to negative content, which could also be driving the change.

Algorithm tweak coming soon to promote more informational/entertaining content. We will publish the changes to @XEng.

Our goal is to maximize unregretted user-seconds. Too much negativity is being pushed that technically grows user time, but not unregretted user time.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 4, 2025

Do we all have to be happy?
When we think through how this would be implemented, the algorithm is likely to leverage a sentiment analysis (possibly using Grok’s Large Language Model), and the threshold for what’s negative will definitely be a point of discussion.

This doesn’t mean every post you make has to be positive to get seen, but it should address those posts that are outrageously negative, often off topic, pushing an agenda not related to the topic.

Personally I don’t expect every post to be sunshine and rainbows, but if this algo change helps cut out the nonsense that wastes your time, then it’ll be a positive change.

Also related to the experience on X, Musk made a change to his posts on the platform, restricting replies to those who are verified or mentioned. It’s important to remember that advertising revenue is also split with creators, but only where readers are verified.

BREAKING: Elon Musk has just restricted replies to his posts to verified users only and those mentioned in the post.

He suggested this change earlier today. This will significantly reduce spam and improve comment quality. pic.twitter.com/dTJIrXyeNb

— DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) January 4, 2025

In other X News, it looks like X is adding a dedicated News section. This is something I’ll be keen to explore, particularly given the ‘Articles’ link is not in this screenshot.

Could it be that X is changing Articles to News? I hope so.