I find this Townhall piece funny because it complains about low-effort content on X while being low-effort content itself. It is an opinion piece built around many screenshots from X.
Townhall writes:
I’m certainly not an avid user of social media, but I, like many of you, consistently use it to get the latest information about politics and world events. Sadly, it has become a cesspool of regurgitated and low-effort content that makes it a mental drain to slog through in an attempt to find relevant information. Thankfully, X has announced that they will be launching a new crackdown to save their app.
The gist of the change is that monetization will no longer benefit the countless copy and paste accounts that litter their app currently. Countless individuals actively run accounts that simply download or repost the same clip uploaded by another account and don’t even go through the effort of writing an original caption. Accounts like those will have their monetization scheme severely hampered.
I’m not a big poster myself. I really only make posts when I am working on an exclusive. Still, I would say that I scroll through the app more than most. Eliminating slop accounts or the absurd number of aggregators and funneling those funds to top-tier creators who have worked to produce engaging and important work. Nick Shirley is the clearest example of this…
Even then, kudos to X for understanding just how terrible things have become on social media and for their desire to fix it.
How elitist. Kudos, Joseph. Thanks for sharing your exclusives on X. We low-effort sloppers are so grateful for your high-quality content. Sometimes we do not even “go through the effort of writing an original caption.”
You know why? Because what we share is already written perfectly, and we do not want to change it and possibly misrepresent what was said.
He says he scrolls through the app more than most people. How would he know that? That is a guess, not a fact.
And if you do not like what you see, you can click “Not interested in this post,” block users, or just stick to your Following tab. You can curate your feed into the kind of experience you want without demanding that everyone else post the way you do.
Meanwhile, he says he is “not a big poster” and only posts when he has an “exclusive.” But we little litterers are what make X so active. Without us, X would just be a bunch of “top-tier creators” posting their exclusives at each other.
The people being demonetized are also the ones helping bring attention to the exclusives and videos.
What this sounds like to me is that X does not want us low-effort, sloppy aggregators to post unless we spend hours crafting every single post. Instead of including us in these changes, they are designing the platform around a narrow group of users who do not post much.
People should be allowed to express themselves the way they want. Not everyone uses X the same way. And as long as people are crediting sources, sharing the news, and not pretending someone else’s work is their own, there should be room for that too.
Don’t worry, Joe. I will never post anything of yours again.
I am getting very close to shutting down my X account for good and never posting again. I suspect that is exactly what people pushing these changes want.
Is that their goal?
***I was banned from X countless times before Musk bought it. I have been banned twice since he bought it, although I was eventually let back on. I get no reach on any of my posts, not even the clips I watch, record, transcribe, research, and debunk. It does not matter what I post—videos I watch and record on TV, links to blogs on my website, YouTube videos, Rumble videos, political cartoons, links to news I want everyone to see, or reposts—nothing gets any reach. Aliens could land in my backyard and I could post video of it, and it would still get no reach.
I have never made a dollar on X. All I am asking for is to be treated equally, especially because I often do produce my own content, and that takes time and effort. I am not asking for special treatment. I am asking not to be dismissed as low-effort slop.