For the first time in years… X is getting… better?
Weekly Scroll: Creator tantrums, cross-cultural poasting, that Trump/Jesus post, and the worst people you know having a very bad time
Welcome to the Weekly Scroll, your guide to what’s happening on the social internet. Join up and make sure you get every edition in your inbox!
For the first time in years… X is getting… better?
I don’t want to unduly alarm you. But after years of continually degrading itself, the shambling corpse of Twitter that we now call X might… just might… be getting somewhat better?
In the last edition of the Weekly Scroll, we talked about how Nate Silver got into a fight with X’s leadership over their promotion of low-quality political slop like Catturd, Gunther Eagleman, etc:
The New York Times has 53 million subscribers but their posts linking to hard-hitting, important news stories often get only 60-100 likes. That does not happen in a vacuum. That is an algorithmic design choice explicitly made by Nikita Bier and Elon Musk, and no amount of quibbling about Nate’s particular graphic can erase that reality. If they wanted to boost high quality journalism, they would. Instead, they chase the cheapest forms of engagement so that somewhere a KPI on a dashboard hits the level that it’s supposed to hit.
While I’m sure Bier would deny there’s any link, Nate’s criticism seems to have landed because last week, Bier announced a set of changes to how creators would be paid out:
This action targets the lowest quality accounts on the site, accounts that copy posts from other users, copy videos from other social networks, do a lot of meaningless quote tweets like “Good point”, or overuse gimmicks like “🚨🚨BREAKING🚨🚨”. It’s a fantastic change, and users could immediately tell it was working because a bunch of low quality accounts immediately started shrieking about it.
The wailing was loudest amongst conservative political accounts and conservative/bro leaning aggregators:
It’s pretty close to an iron law of the internet that if you whine about your impressions or your creator payouts, you are terrible and your existence makes whatever site you’re on a worse place. Left or right, political or non-political, no exceptions.
I cannot imagine anything more humiliating than logging on to X Dot Com The Everything App and typing the words “What am I supposed to post so that the algorithm doesn’t punish me???”. Bitch, you’re supposed to post because you’re mentally ill and addicted to the internet, just like the rest of us. We post for love of the game, not to eke out a few more ElonBucks. Have some goddamn pride.
Meanwhile! X also released a change a couple weeks ago that has made the site notably more interesting - automatic translation. In-app/on-site translation has been available for a while now, but now instead of having to hit a ‘translate this post’ button the site simply does it for you. Like magic, users from different countries began interacting.
The most notable interactions have been between American X and Japanese X. There are nearly as many Japanese users of the platform as there are American user, but until a few weeks ago they were invisible because the algorithm simply wouldn’t show English language users Japanese language posts. But with the auto-translation feature (and likely some algorithmic changes), Japanese posts started popping up in Western feeds and English language posts in Japanese feeds. And it’s been incredibly interesting.
The first big trend to come out of the cross-contamination was… Barbeque. Japanese users were apparently crazy for authentic, Texas style barbeque and their new American friends were more than happy to show them all about it. Later, there was a genuinely heartwarming moment where an American user’s post about Fukushima went viral. Apparently, many Japanese people think that foreigners view Fukushima as shameful and hate Japanese people because of it, while the post argues that most Americans think Fukushima was a tragic accident and view the workers there as heroes. This post went absolutely nuclear (pun intended) on the Japanese internet and may have single-handedly improved US-Japan relations.
This sort of thing is happening all the time now. Another big trend I’ve seen is Russians being shocked that not everyone hates them and posting about how they dislike their own government as well. As best I can tell, this is the first instance in the history of the internet where cross-language posting is this seamless, and it’s leading to unprecedented new conversations and discourses.
Of course nothing gold can stay, and I’m sure some of the feel good cross-cultural exchanges will give way to fighting about geopolitical nonsense soon enough. The Japan-US lovefest is already being tested by a battle over copyright protections - Japanese users seem to strongly view any form of piracy whatsoever as evil, whereas American users are far more nonchalant about it. But for now, the predominant feeling is good vibes and fun. And that, combined with the decimation of the 🚨🚨BREAKING🚨🚨slop accounts, has led to the first real improvement in X’s quality in the past few years.
Why do you believe in God?
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
How’s streaming doing these days?
You may remember back in 2023, both the Writers’ Guild and SAG went on strike, paralyzing much of Hollywood. One of the biggest concerns for the unions was that an increasing amount of industry revenue was coming from online streaming platforms, and they didn’t believe that actors and writers were getting a fair cut of that revenue. There were many areas of disagreement, but one specific topic that came up over and over was the lack of clarity around the viewer numbers for streaming shows - there was no real way to tell who was doing well and who wasn’t. As part of the labor agreement that ended the strike, platforms agreed to provide more analytics and data for each show and to grant bonuses to streaming shows and movies that did particularly well.
Now, three years later, some interesting data courtesy of Bloomberg:
