Social networking platform X is implementing strong measures to limit the situation of content attracting views and generalizing news rampant, by significantly reducing payments to violating accounts.
This information was announced by Mr. Nikita Bier, head of product department of X. Accordingly, accounts specializing in posting general or sensational content will have their income reduced by about 60% in the current payment cycle, and may continue to reduce by another 20% in the next period.
Mr. Nikita Bier said that this platform is specifically targeting accounts that regularly post content "filling the timeline" with sensational headlines, or abusing phrases like "BREAKING" to attract interaction.
He emphasized that the posting of a series of copied, invaluable content is overshadowing genuine creators and hindering the development of new authors.
Everything has become clear when flooding the timeline with hundreds of retweets and view-baiting content every day is harming the content ecosystem," Mr. Bier said. However, he also affirmed that X does not restrict freedom of speech or access, but only refuses to pay for system manipulation.
This policy quickly caused mixed reactions. Dominick McGee, who owns the Dom Lucre account with more than 1.6 million followers on X, said he was once turned off from making money for no apparent reason.
McGee affirmed that he is one of the most active creators on the platform and expressed his dissatisfaction when affected.
Although admitting that abusing the phrase "hot news" is a view-baiting trick, McGee believes that his content does not belong to this group. However, the user community has refuted by pointing out dozens of times he used the phrase "BREAKING" in just one week.
Not only McGee, many other accounts also said that their incomes have decreased significantly. An account named PoliMath expressed concern about being mistakenly classified as a "synthesizer", although affirming that it does not operate under this model.
X's move takes place in the context that this platform continues to face many debates about content quality and usage value.
Data analyst Nate Silver recently said that it is increasingly difficult to attract traffic from X to external websites, and believes that the content ecosystem is unbalanced.
However, both Bier and platform owner Elon Musk rejected this claim, saying that the analysis did not fully reflect the reality.
X's strong cut in income for view-bait content shows efforts to reshape the content ecosystem towards quality priority.
However, this policy also poses a major challenge for creators, especially those who rely on short, synthetic content models to maintain income.
