X is reducing payouts to accounts that “flood the timeline” with clickbait and rapid news gathering, according to head of product Nikita Bier.
Bier wrote on Saturday that “[a]All aggregators have had their payouts cut by 60% this cycle,” and said they’ll see another 20% cut in the next pay cycle. He also said the Elon Musk-owned social network will cut payouts for “regular bait posters who use ‘🚨BREAKING’ in every post.”
“It became very clear: flooding the timeline with 100s of stolen retweets and clicking daily sidelined real creators and hurt the growth of new writers,” Bier said, adding, “X will never hack speech or reach — but we won’t compensate for manipulating the program or our users.”
Bier’s comments came after the start of a series of conservative news stories posting that they had received an email from X notifying them that their accounts had been dismantled.
Dominick McGee, who publishes under the name Dom Lucre, he wrote“🔥🚨 BREAKING […] I was the first monetized creator on this platform and I was for a whole year. I took it back and just lost it without any awareness. How could this be possible? I’m one of the hardest working creators at X.”
McGee’s account has 1.6 million followers on X. It first became popular for posting conspiracy theories related to the 2020 presidential election, and while it was temporarily banned from X in 2023 and decriminalized in 2024, he told the New York Times last year that he was making $55,000 a year from the platform.
In response to Bier’s post, McGee complained that X seemed to be listening to “the complaints of people who don’t have a goal to build on this app.” And while he acknowledged that declaring every post breaking news would be “clickbait,” he argued, “I post hundreds of times and very few are AMAZING.” (Some X users seem to disagree, adding a community note linking the 91 times he had used the word “BREAKING” in the past week.)
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Other users have claimed that they got caught in the suppression of X, with an account named PoliMath publication“I think I appreciate what Nikita is trying to do there, but I just had my lowest payment in a long time, so I’m a little nervous that I somehow got caught in that ‘aggregators’ bucket.” The account said they’re “not ‘aggregators’ by any means, though they did acknowledge that they had a paid partnership with Kalshi.”
Bier’s comments also came after a new round of debate about the value of the X platform, with data analyst and pundit Nate Silver complaining about how difficult it has become to drive traffic from X to other sites. He also pointed to the dominance of right-wing accounts on X, stating, “I guess I had some intuition about how bad it was, but hey, that’s what happens when the ecosystem breaks.”
Beer claimed that Silver’s data is not accurate, and Musk called his posts “bullshit.” other analyses have supported his claims.
