Nikita Bier, X’s head of product, in a now-deleted post:

The most definitive measure of posting ability is your follower-to-total posts ratio (essentially: how many posts did it take you to get where you are today)?

We should probably start showing this instead of follower count to signal account quality.

The problem with Bier is that he only sees dollar signs everywhere. If it’s not a way to sell more ads via increasing daily active users or active minutes, he doesn’t want it. He doesn’t care about his users or their thoughts; he cares about making money. Scrolling through Bier’s account, this is immediately apparent. Here’s a selection of quotes:

  • January 11, teasing the upcoming Smart Cashtags feature: “X is the best source for financial news — and hundreds of billions of dollars are deployed based on things people read here.”
  • January 10, on the new algorithm: “The algorithm was rebuilt from scratch by the xAI team and now runs on +20K GPUs at the Colossus data center… Time spent is up 20% and follows are up even more. But there is still so much more to improve.”
  • January 9, about the new Priority notifications tab: “You’ll now get a notification anytime someone follows you with more followers (or has >150K)”
  • January 4, Bier-ing: “X has hit the ground running in 2026: It is the highest engagement start-of-the-year in X’s history — with yesterday being among our biggest days.”
  • December 15, on the new xAI-powered algorithm: “X is on track for the best December in the app’s history. There are still some rough edges to polish before the holidays, but the algorithm team is making huge strides with the timeline.”

There’s a clear theme here: Bier only cares about boosting time spent on the app. Time spent is up 20 percent! Follows are up even more! You’ll get a notification when someone famous replies! Highest engagement start-of-the-year! Yesterday was one of our biggest days! December was the best in the app’s history! This is exhausting, if not patronizing, but it makes sense coming from him. Bier’s claim to fame is a hot-or-not app called Gas — and one that came before it, called TBH (stylized as “tbh”) — that was acquired by Discord and shot up to the top of the App Store rankings because teenagers loved to engage with it. That’s Bier’s cup of tea: making useless apps for teenagers without fully developed prefrontal cortices.

Back to X. Elon Musk strutted into Twitter headquarters with a fundamental misunderstanding of why Twitter was broke. He blamed it on institutional bloat, which undeniably existed, but employee salaries and “proudly woke” T-shirts weren’t driving the company into the ground. Neither was the application programming interface, nor were the numerous deals with publishers and researchers to bring Twitter data into more contexts, such as to fuel election misinformation research. Twitter was so strapped for cash because it put user experience ahead of any metric. Its one profitable year, 2020, was a complete fluke, and it returned to unprofitability as soon as the news cycle slowed. It could have been profitable if it tried to artificially extend the 2020 wave into the Musk era, but it didn’t — it focused on authenticity, not money.

X/Twitter is full of people shouting into the void until something works. Viral tweets are written by people with 56 followers who wake up one morning to the disbelief that their shower thought got 200,000 likes overnight. That’s the beauty of Twitter, and that’s why people keep coming back. Tens of thousands of people use Twitter as their journal, posting quick little quips or reactions to things from their day. There’s an entire account dedicated to a woman posting pictures from her walks and what she ate for dinner — that account gets thousands of likes every day. She’s not a celebrity or a “high value” account by any of Bier’s metrics, but she and people like her make Twitter the quirky, wonderful place that it is. Not everyone is Taylor Swift, with very few tweets and very many followers. Boosting only such accounts proves a fundamental misunderstanding of social networking.

The harsh yet utterly rewarding quality of Twitter inspires authenticity. Very few people post on the platform to actually get attention. They’re there to have a good time, find some friends, and engage in interesting conversations. It’s people slaving away posting 10 tweets a day with zero likes just to have one go viral that makes the platform special. Twitter is not filled with entirely “high-quality” content (i.e., celebrity tweets; high engagement), but it is filled with interesting, authentic perspectives. It’s quite literally TikTok but for text. Its users skew slightly nerdy, introverted, and tech-savvy. Twitter has a culture, one where a nobody posting an image out of context becomes a viral sensation. Just scroll through Know Your Meme. No social platform — not Bluesky, Mastodon, Reddit, or even Threads — has been able to fully replicate this authenticity.

User minutes or daily active users are terrible metrics to determine if people are having a good time on a website. People will spend a lot of time reading tweets they hate. They’ll engage with content that makes them angry. Nikita Bier, again, is too stupid to understand this. Or perhaps he’s acting maliciously, forcing rage bait down people’s throats to boost engagement using the algorithm he claims he doesn’t work on, yet also says he does. Funny character.