the X algorithm changed.. here's what's working now:

The first thing you need to understand, this was like a big insight for me. I don't have the book on my desk here, but in my book, The Art and Business of Online Writing, something that I talk a lot about is that you have to pay attention to the context of these different platforms. You have to realize that each of these, like, even though these are huge platforms, right? Platforms with hundreds of millions or billions of users. You have to remember that they are still owned and operated by human beings. Okay? So these aren't like these amorphous containers. They are things that are built by other humans. And you also have to pay attention to where is the money? Like another easy example, back in 2021, 2022, maybe a little earlier, 2021, I think. Substack raised a monster round. And when I saw them raise tens of millions of dollars from some of the most well-known VC firms in the world, immediately I went, okay, they just raised enough. They just raised a war chest that could last the next decade. So what am I going to do? I'm going to follow the money. You just raised all this capital. I think now is a good time to start posting on this platform. I am going to build a newsletter, a paid newsletter on Substack. I'm— as soon as they launched Substack Notes in 2023 and they sent out their, you know, news, their company newsletter, and they were like, we are now prioritizing Notes to make this a reader destination. Immediately I was like, follow the money. Okay, great. Let's start reposting all of our X content over on Substack. A very easy way of capitalizing on opportunities in the world of digital writing is just follow the money, follow the incentives. Okay. So if you go look at a platform like X, this is why I like staying on top of these things. I like continuing to educate myself. And if you don't want to, then that's great that you're here because I can just give you the summary notes. What was it, 6 months ago, 4 months ago? X hired this guy to basically take over as head of product. His name is Nikita Baer. Drop in the chat. Anyone familiar with Nikita or has anyone been following his work on X? Okay. The thing that you need to know, like, this is like if you just pay attention, like the answer stares at you in the face, you know? So the thing that you need to know about Nikita is He's a serial entrepreneur, and he basically has built an entire career around capitalizing on interesting trends, specifically like consumer short-form types of content and platforms, and he has built a reputation for generating a lot of virality around the things that he does. I don't know him, so I'm not saying that this was a judgment, but just from my observations, I don't think that he's someone that sits there and thinks that much about, like, how do I prioritize the highest quality content on X? Yes, they want quality because they want users engaged and they want users having a good time. But again, follow the incentives. Like, if you're hired as head of product, What are your incentives? Your incentives are, I want to make daily active users go up. I want to make screen time go up. I want to make engaging with other posts go up. And if you know anything about human nature, most people tend to default back into like, what is the thing that requires the least amount of cognitive load? What's the thing that I don't have to think about? On top of that, Nikita has shared on X that he is aiming in a direction of how do you make X like TikTok for text? And if you spent any time on TikTok, TikTok is very— it's very like short, viral, meme-y type of content focused. And then depending on what pocket you get into, you get served the occasional like long-form video, like a 2 or 3-minute video about something that's really specific to your, to your interests. But for the most part, TikToks are like pretty short and it's like, haha, it's like, oh, that's clever. Or like, whoa, that's shocking, right? Over the past couple of months, as Nikita has taken over X, you can see that this is what's been changing in the X algorithm. I'm sure everyone here, if you spend any time on this platform, you probably have seen a lot more like very viral one-liner short-form posts. From like random people, random accounts, you know, about the most random things. It's like, it's like one person like says a funny one-liner about walking into KFC one afternoon, or another person writes like a paragraph short story about like an overheard conversation in an elevator, like really like obscure and sort of random and yet engaging things. As a result, Your For You page is showing you a lot more of things that appeal to the masses. This is really important to understand because whenever you see algorithms doing things like this, you have to inherently ask yourself, like our business is a great example, what is the sweet spot? How do you stay true to your industry and stay true to your niche while also taking advantage of new content formats and like playing the game, right? Like if, if the algorithm is clearly telling you these are the rules of the new game and you choose not to do any of them, then you shouldn't be surprised that the algorithm is rewarding other people other than you because the rules have changed. But you also don't want to completely over-rotate where all you're doing is trying to write things that appeal to everyone and you abandon your niche, right? So that becomes the crux of the decision is how do you find the sweet spot? How do you stay true to the niche that you're writing about, especially when that niche is connected to a business like ours, or you over-rotate and you just try and write things that go viral, but they have no purpose to you, right? Like I could write something that gets 10 million views, but if it's not aimed in the direction of writers, then like what's the point? 'Cause our business is not dependent on traffic, our business is dependent on a very specific type of traffic. We want people who want to write to join our ecosystem. So yes, so how do we solve this? Like what do we actually do? Okay, so there's a couple things that I wanna point out. Because whenever I see stuff like this, I think the answer, or at least this is what I've come to as the answer for myself, I think the answer is keep writing about the topics that you are, but change the format, change the packaging. So it's not abandon your niche, abandon the topic, abandon the industry. It's keep writing about the industry that you're writing about, but adapt it to new formats. As I talk about some of these new formats, I want to— there's a big asterisk next to what I'm about to say, which is this is clearly a slightly more advanced topic. Okay, if you're still in a place of you haven't really started writing consistently on the internet yet, Sure, all of this is interesting. You can do with it whatever you'd like, but the primary thing to solve for, for you, is not picking the perfect format. It is literally just hitting publish. So I want to, I want to be very clear, like, what thing are you actually solving for? If you are consistently writing and hitting publish right now, then the next thing is you iterate on that consistency and you can do it better or differently. If you are not currently writing, then yeah, sure, like implement some of these things, but like realize that that's the second step. The first step is just consistently writing. And I'm going to show you why this is so important, because again, the goal is not virality for the sake of virality. The goal is not even like views or impressions or any of those metrics. The goal is building a library So when a platform changes, all you have to do is just copy paste, copy paste. Real quick, if you want to write online but aren't sure where to start, click the link in the description of this video and check out startwritingonline.com.

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