The reply section on X usually feels like a war zone. A mess.
X wants to change that. Not with a huge overhaul, but with a small, targeted tweak.
Nikita Bier, the platform’s head of product posted the update on Monday.
It’s about mutuals. Specifically people you follow back.
“We’re rolling out a small tweak,” Bier wrote. He explained the goal: boosting the visibility of posts from these mutual connections.
Why? Because the algorithm was blind to them.
The existing code didn’t properly weigh the relationship between you and the people who follow you back. This meant your friends appeared less in the reply threads. Instead their voices got drowned out.
What filled the gap? Strangers. Random accounts you don’t recognize.
The result, according to Bier was a reply section that felt “more like a battleground” with people you didn’t know.
The fix is simple in theory. If you and another user follow each other your replies show up higher.
This should help interest-based clusters form. It’s something users have been asking for. Does it matter if the other person follows you? Yes apparently it does now.
This isn’t happening in a vacuum. X has been tinkering with its recommendation engine all year.
Remember April? That’s when they dropped the Grok -powered custom timelines.
Premium subscribers could pin feeds built around specific niches. Bier sold it as a way to “dive deep” into favorite topics. Users were curious but wary. Many complained the content got repetitive or that categories overlapped too much.
Now the mutuals boost lands on a very shaky foundation.
The safety record here is poor. Really poor.
GLAAD released its Social Media Safety Index in May. X scored a 29 out of 1 00. Lowest among the six platforms reviewed.
The report found the landscape was rife with anti-LGBTQ+ hate, harassment and disinformation. X sat at the bottom of the barrel.
So will showing more faces from your inner circle fix the toxicity?
Probably not entirely. But it’s an experiment in curating proximity.
It forces the app to care who you know rather than just who is shouting the loudest. Whether that actually improves the vibe remains to be seen.
