Elon's New X Algorithm Aims To Help the Little Guy

Elon is one of those guys who draws all kinds of attention and is sometimes an easy target for not-so-flattering press, but here's some news that will be hard to find fault with.


The company formerly known as Twitter (kind of rolls off your tongue) is getting ready to give its users a "major update" to the X algorithm. The app's "For You" feed currently brings popular and trending posts from a broad network and puts them next to highlights from people you follow, but this new algorithm will bring posts from smaller accounts to the surface. That news came from Elon himself in a recent post on X.

This means you will start seeing posts and accounts outside of your "friends and follows," which is an attempt to expose users to accounts they might find interesting but haven't yet discovered.

It's good news for creators, too, because it will give smaller creators a chance to be discovered by a wider audience. This move is all part of Elon's plan to make X a "creator platform."

In recent months, X has introduced cool features such as long-form posts that extend the character limit to 25,000 for paying subscribers, the ability to upload two-hour videos, and, of course, an ad revenue-sharing program that X CEO Linda Yaccarino says has paid out almost $20 million to creators. That's a sweet payday.

Elon's bigger plan (because he always has a bigger plan, right?) is to give creators the chance to build an audience on X and then rake in the money on their posts using a combination of ad revenue sharing and subscriptions, where fans can pay creators for exclusive content.

Creators are a little slow to put their future in Elon's hands. While some are managing to build small audiences on X, many are looking to monetize on "bigger fish" platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram.

If the X algorithm change is successful, it could give smaller creators a broader reach on the platform, increasing X usage and improving the little guy's discoverability.

One of the big fears for creators, however, is whether or not this can work in light of the news that X has been losing advertisers and users in the year since Musk took over. There is also a rise in startup competitors that make X look like a "thing of the past."

Musk said last Friday (Nov 10th) that the algorithm update would be rolling out over "the next few days," so we should start seeing some changes. He stated it would be made open source as it "undergoes continuous improvement."

We can't wait to see how X's new experiment goes.

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