Fur5

Amateur philosopher.
Pentester for vulnerable networks.
Love animal fur.
Not a furry.

[Fur5 @Fur5658]

To the people who keep saying CoD is back. You're the problem and why the game is shit nowadays. Consuming it and expecting Activision to upkeep the servers when their games keep getting hacked.

[Fur5 @Fur5658]

>Black Ops 1 and 2 release again
>look inside
>Ports with nothing new and will likely get pwned within hours of release

[Treyarch @Treyarch]

It's official: the original Black Ops and Black Ops 2 are being ported to PlayStation in July, courtesy of our partners at @IronGalaxy. 🤝

[Fur5 @Fur5658]

Even other companies have a better VDPs. Look at the public reports on HackerOne. You'll see better communication than what Microsoft did here. All of this was unnecessary and I don't know why Microsoft acted that way. All I know it's a company you wouldn't trust your data in their hands.

[Perma Banned ထ🔨 @GiveMeBanHammer]

Nikita Bier says he only rewards "high-quality" posts on X. So I wrote one exactly - to his own rules - to show him why his algorithm is quietly destroying the "Public Square" we were promised.

For those who are about to read this - I want to make this clear that this is an opinion after using X for around 3 years since Elon's acquisition alongside some factual information expressed either by Nikita himself or people who have an understanding of X's current algorithm changes.

This is not in any way personal, as I am only drawing opinions from the product that Nikita has as of now worked on for quite some time, and how much better/worse it is. I am giving my opinion on his work and not him personally.

With that said, I am going to get started:

Nikita Bier, you’ve made it clear that you want every post on X to meet your high bar for ‘quality’ content - or have its reach severely limited. Fair enough. I’ll meet you at that bar and deliver exactly what you’ve asked for: a genuinely high-quality post by your specification. I have taken the time to do some research, and some digging.

Let's talk about you Nikita Bier, the current de-facto ruler of X (used to be known as Twitter), and his very high standards:

The High Quality Post

Let's start simple, Nikita goes on and on about how he only want the "Highest quality posts" that are not "aggregations", "gaming", "cheap engagement"...and the factors he has provided to feed into his little pet algorithm from highest priority to lowest are:

- Replies - 13 to 25x more valuable than a like
- Bookmarks - 10 to 12x more valuable than a like
- Shares - 10 to 20x depending on if its a repost or a quotepost
- Likes - baseline

Nikita also goes on and on about how his algo will prioritise posts that "promote positive vibes" and that posts on X should enforce a positive feedback loop.

Well now here's the first problem, and its the biggest problem that Nikita has not realised or pretends to not realise.

RATIOS EXIST.

Nikita should have known for years at this point, if a post has much more replies than it does like or reposts, it usually means it is a negativity-filled hot take or ragebait, where most if not all of the flood of comments are blatantly hostile, antagonistic or just plain critical.

So...in the case of X, posts having "high comments to like" ratios, be "positive in vibe and conversation". That is something most users of this site know in a matter of mere months. High volume of comments, are usually in DIRECT CONFLICT with positive vibes.

So Nikita, which is it? Do you want posts that are less toxic - ergo posts that have more likes/reposts compared to comments,

OR

do you want rage-bait or incendiary posts, which leads to less likes but more replies? Do you even understand how the typical user of this site even behaves before you impose these metrics?

What becomes an even bigger punchline to all of this - Nikita even ADMITS that you could have PERFECT post that ticks all the boxes on his arbitrary "Quality" list, and if you commit the unthinkable crime of...posting multiple times in a day, your "High Quality" post will mean absolutely NOTHING because it will get its reach throttled and crippled anyway.

Why? There's now an algorithmic 'cooldown' on every account, that prevents anyone from making spontaneous posts or just more than a maximum of roughly 5 posts a day, because doing so is now deemed "spammy behaviour" and so you get struck with the reach cripple.

Some system this is Nikita - at this point why even call it a "Social" Media, when the most important part of it, the "Social" part is rendered almost entirely useless?

His "Successful Apps" - How they work

Nikita flaunts his "11 years of app development" as a selling point for Elon to hire him, so I decided to dig into his app development history and found his past repertoire of apps.

Nikita Bier flaunts these apps as being extremely successful with millions of users and downloads each - fair. I will however talk about that success later on. For now I want to go into a bit more detail on what these apps are and how they tick...

First app, is TBH...pitched as an "social media apps", but in reality are more anonymous compliment/polling apps catered to highschool students where they vote on heavily sanitised things about their schoolmates (e.g. 'Best smile', 'Smartest' etc).

His second app, GAS - has the exact same core functionality as TBH, just a different name and different aesthetics.

These two apps from what I can gather have very hyper-specific and extremely narrow reach algorithms, that again are more suited for Highschool students, instead of something general purpose like X...namely

- Extremely narrow environment: Limited to one high school at a time (strong local network effects + closed groups).
- Pre-written, positive-only prompts: Multiple-choice polls, no free text is allowed as this was deliberate to prevent bullying/abuse.
- Anonymous dopamine loops: You get notified you were chosen, but not by whom. Pure curiosity + validation hits.
- Short, high-frequency sessions: Designed for quick 30–60 second bursts of voting among friends, not long-form or persistent use.
- Heavy constraints for virality: Address book access, school verification, shuffle mechanics, gem/reward systems — all optimized for teen social dynamics in a temporary seasonal window

These two apps fulfilled very narrow functions, and I hazard a guess those apps' algorithms are very incompatible with a supposedly open, persistent, global public square where there will be short punchy spontaneous memes, that exist alongside well thought-out in depth discussions and conversations.

What Happened to these "Successful Apps"?

Facebook acquired TBH back around October 16 2017, and guess what happened? Zucc deemed TBH to be a failure in less than a year and shut it down around July 2 2018 - FB cited that the app had "low usage" and was unsustainable. The app only lasted another 8.5 months.

Discord on the other hand acquired GAS at around January 17 2023, and any guesses what happened? If you said that Discord shut down GAS in less than a year because the app had very low usage and it was unsustainable...then you are completely correct. The app was shut down by Discord November 7 2023, around 9-10 months.

What does this mean? Both of these apps have proven to ONLY be successful in a very short term, and as the months roll by, these apps rapidly lose momentum, until they eventually flounder and fail.

This discovery and realisation is made even more ironic given that Nikita sells himself by saying that he specialises in "Not leading products to decay". What we see, with both TBH and GAS, has indicated very strongly, that these products have in fact not just decayed, but decayed remarkably fast in app lifetime terms.

Again, am I supposed to believe that a "specialist" like Nikita Bier, can SUSTAIN the growth or at least maintain the state of X over a long period of time? An app that is supposed to run indefinitely and be a long-term form of public square for not just students, but adults of various different occupations who consume and produce content and discourse of different lengths and sophistication?

Well it seems the consensus of many of the larger accounts, let alone smaller ones is - Nikita is way out of his depth and his changes are basically a slow but noticeable deterioration of this website. These are opinions I have noticed by:

- the supposed "both sides of the culture war", left and right
- non-political video game devs, news, content creator accounts
- anime/manga accounts
- vtuber accounts from both Western and Asian side

Of course, this is not even talking about the supposed "bot purges" that for some reason I keep getting replies on my other social media accounts or from mutuals saying "X thought I was a bot and deleted my account, apparently I can't appeal it!". Again, purging bots that are part of the botted likes syndicate, or ones that scam and do fake engagement is GOOD - however what the problems seems to be is that the inbuild Ai moderation that X is using is that much better than Youtube by the looks of it. That's however a whole different can of worms and this post/article is getting too long as it is.

Conclusion

To be completely honest with you all, I was contemplating hard on whether I wanted to write this. I spent quite some time just holding on to the harshest self-reflection perspective as I noticed the reach plummets. "Perhaps I am just cringe and just bad at this" is the assumption I made for myself...that was until I started to notice these recurring patterns.

It has been happening for quite some time, slowly but surely. The biggest reason why I noticed it is solely because I saw what X/Twitter used to be when Elon personally ran it and did not rely on people like Nikita. Flawed as it was, if you made posts that are good and resonate with people, you will be rewarded for it. If you have a talent or a skill to keep making posts that resonate with others, you will continue to be rewarded for it.

What we have now, is the complete opposite. What Nikita and the publicly disclosed metrics to the algorithm is NOT rewarding you for a quality post that resonates to many...it is instead an algorithm that punishes you for doing that. X now more than ever deliberately stops you from being rewarded for posting an original video, making nuanced and insightful takes, or just sharing moments you enjoy while you are online or playing a video game. The "COOLDOWN" system is antithetical to a "social" media, it acts more like a "Publisher media", there is no actual honest "socialising" when the website itself deliberately deprives you of communicating with your audience and others because you "talked too much today".

Instead, the algorithm continues and even more ferociously reward rage-baiting, incendiary posting that draw immense amounts of replies...because Xai doesn't KNOW the difference between positivity engagement vs negativity engagement. They just see "oh the post has many replies, that means people like it!".

So how do I sum up X's algorithm changes in one meme?

Helldivers 2 "Balancing"

So Nikita if you are reading this - X is NOT TBH or GAS, stop treating it like your old apps.

[Fur5 @Fur5658]

@xecoglet Likely true. But they're whatever Cygames want them to be for profits.

Also an unrelated note: Mambo

[Fur5 @Fur5658]

@ShitpostRock2 "If IGN published a bad review about a game. It HAS to be good"

I wouldn't say it's mostly regurgitated but a broken clock can be right twice a day.

[Fur5 @Fur5658]

@DocStrangelove2 I may as well call myself a weeb at this point. Embrace it as is.

[Fur5 @Fur5658]

@Pirat_Nation A Reze PFP is making more sense than a giant corporation, what a world we live in. Microsoft really can't fix their OS even if it meant saving their own lives in the process. How disappointing.

[Fur5 @Fur5658]

@ChibiReviews I may as well watch this show if they hate it. Maybe I'll give my two cents if it's good. I'll give Girls und Panzer a chance and play some Blue Archive while I'm at it.

[Fur5 @Fur5658]

@CryptoCyberia I mean sure, This maybe works. I can't exactly say, I'm pretty sure you could be more discreet with a laptop at a food court there in the mall or with a rooted phone I guess?

Also: Holy LARP because Claude and Windows 11 is going to snitch on you if this was for real.

[Fur5 @Fur5658]

@TheyWokeAmongUs @MentisWave Unironically True.

[Fur5 @Fur5658]

Considering that in California, corruption is pretty much a normal thing going on. There would be immigrants using other's social security to collect benefits they're not entitled to.

Also add into the fact for some reason the Illegals or Mexicans from my anecdotal experience, they hate white people, especially the young adults because the whites have more money than them apparently. And that's down in Southern California. They also play songs that can be called "uncultured".

Liberal politics don't help either since they only care about immigration. That's all they care about, they want to stay in the country as long as possible to make enough money to either stay in the country or go back to Mexico. But some do stay in the country. But don't assimilate or uphold American values.

Now I feel like I must leave this wretched state for Texas or other red states I can look forward to. Better for my work anyways.

[CunnyCEO of Kivotos @atcunnyceo]

Let's do it again✌️

Retweet for mutuals
(previous one got age restricted)

[CunnyCEO of Kivotos @atcunnyceo]

46th is the charm ✌️

Retweet for mutuals
(Pic unrelated)

[Dziku 🛐 💙💢 @dziku_o7]

retweet for mutuals 🙏

[Fur5 @Fur5658]

@OtakuEspiritu Internet Anarchist makes slop content. Of course he's going have slop opinions. Worth nothing of value, what else did anyone expect of him to do? It's like those thumbnails with the caption that reads "IT'S OVER" or "FINALLY FINISHED". It disgusts me.

[Fur5 @Fur5658]

@Dexerto Watch out people. He'll grow up to be the next John Moses Browning at this rate.

[Tim 🏴‍☠️🏴Decentralize and nullify 🏴🏴‍☠️ @Tim_The_Sandman]

This is funny...

...until you realize what it means:

They're going to lock things down even harder and put even greater emphasis on forcing ADULTS to positively ID using gov't provided credentials to unlock any online features.

They needed this initial failure to be able to point at more draconian measures and say "see, we tried the less invasive way and it didn't work..."

Don't accept what they're going to implement next.

[Fur5 @Fur5658]

This may seem good. But like some others that said, this will make the governments push for more regulations to extract more data out of us.

They're going to want more and more information to verify our age to the point where they will want to control our devices itself and what we're allowed to do on them. All in the name of protecting the children.