X Premium Support is a Gaslighting Kafkaesque Parody of Itself

I’m a paying Premium subscriber with about 4,000 followers (give or take, it depends on the week). As I’ve documented before, in mid-October 2025 my daily impressions on X dropped 75% overnight and never recovered. My content quality didn’t change. My posting habits didn’t change. My engagement rate actually increased. But something changed overnight—whether it was X’s rollout of their fucked-up Grok-powered algorithm on October 19, my removal of 137 bot accounts the day before, some combination of the two, or intentional account-level suppression, I don’t know. I’ll probably never know. X won’t tell me.

I have analytics charts showing the exact moment the floor dropped out, engagement rates proving the content still works when people actually see it, and systematic elimination of every standard explanation for why reach would crater while engagement stayed strong. 

I contacted Premium support with what amounted to a PowerPoint presentation and asked them to explain what happened to my account. I showed them how September through mid-October 2025 I was running 15,000-34,000 daily impressions. Then mid-October hit and my impressions cratered by 75% and never recovered. I pointed out my engagement rate during the same period increased, averaging 8.1% over the last three months, a 32% climb over the previous period. It hit 9.4% in the last four weeks, and has reached 11.7% in the last seven days. Platform average engagement sits at 0.5-1%. I’m running 8-16 times higher than average and trending upward even as my reach gets drowned like a stray kitten.

I even provided a concrete example. 

Earlier today I posted about AI marketing materials for indie authors—content directly relevant to my follower base since many of them are indies trying to figure out this exact problem. On its first three hours the post only received 70 impressions (at the time of writing it’s now reached a whopping… checks notes… 177 impressions). Remember, I have 4K followers. Of those few who saw it, 24% engaged in the first three hours and it’s sustained a 20% engagement rate since then. 6.2% have clicked through to read the full article (which isn’t just good, it’s spectacular).

The people who see my content engage with it at fabulous rates; they’re just not being shown it.

And today’s post isn’t an outlier either—I’ve tracked multiple individual posts and seen the same pattern for weeks. Extremely limited reach despite engagement rates of 15-50%. Even my typical posts perform at 8-12 times platform average.

“Reginald” from the Premium Support team was eager to assist me.

“I understand you have questions about increasing your impressions and reach,” he said. “Here are some tips on growing your account:”

1. Post authentically: Engage with your audience using a human voice, avoiding random or disjointed messages.
2. Utilize engaging media: Incorporate GIFs, videos, and memes to make your posts visually appealing and shareable.
3. Share relevant content: Post visually captivating content and use analytics to craft meaningful tweets that resonate with your audience.
4. Promote your Account: Increase visibility by consistently posting. Consider running promoted posts to expand your audience further.

Seriously, dude?

I showed Reginald my charts demonstrating in the last month 81.6% of my posts were shown to—at best—fewer than 1 out of 20 people who explicitly follow me, with the long tail averaging 1 out of 70. Only 12.3% reached 5-12.5% of my followers. Less than 4% reached 12.5-25%. A meager 1.7% reached 25.5-40%. One single post managed to hit 2.8K impressions (yay), but it was a statistical outlier for the reporting period.

This obviously isn’t normal algorithmic filtering, I argued. It smells like account-level suppression. Or your AI has cocked up the platform spectacularly.

Either way, as a paying customer I demand answers.

Oh, and the suppression works both ways. I can’t reach my existing audience—and I can’t reach new audiences either. My non-follower reach has collapsed 59% in three months: from a 22.5% average down to 9.1% in the last 28 days, down further to 6.9% in the last week. The platform is choking both retention and growth. I can’t keep the audience I have and I can’t build a new one.

I preempted Reginald’s scripted responses with counterarguments. Was the link in my example post the culprit? No. X removed algorithmic penalties on external links this last October, and even when link penalties existed they reportedly limited reach to 10-20% of followers—so I should be seeing 400-800 impressions, not 70. If my followers didn’t care about the post’s content, why did 1 in 4 people who saw it engage with it? Did it receive strong initial engagement? Yes. Has engagement been sustained? Yes. Was it posted at peak times? Irrelevant. Timing optimization typically improves reach by 20-40%, not by orders of magnitude—even bad timing with 4,000 followers distributed across time zones should reach more than 1.75% of my audience. And post format affects engagement rates, not whether the platform shows content to your existing followers at all. Images might increase the percentage of viewers who engage, but they don’t explain why over 98% of my followers aren’t seeing my damned posts in the first double-damned place.

Even accepting that organic reach runs 1-10% of followers for mid-sized accounts, I’m at the absolute floor while paying for Premium subscription explicitly marketed as boosting visibility and providing priority ranking. If my organic reach were simply normal for accounts my size, Premium should elevate me above that baseline.

Instead I’m sitting with sub-2% reach.

Either Premium provides no actual benefit—meaning X is committing fraud by charging for reach they don’t deliver—or my account is being suppressed to a degree that overrides whatever boost Premium is supposed to provide.

Reginald’s bullshit response? “We checked your X account and it looks like you are not getting engagement because other users do not find your posts interesting. Just keep trying to post quality content that other users would like to see and engagement will come naturally!”

Yes. He literally said, to my face, that users don’t find my posts interesting while looking at engagement rates running 8-16 times higher than platform average.

That’s not customer service. That’s fucking gaslighting.

And I said as much, but politely, with diplomatic non-colorful euphemisms. I pointed back to the data. He replied, “Creator revenue sharing payouts are calculated based on the engagement with your content from Premium users. Your analytics mixes non-verified users.”

Excuse me?

I wasn’t asking about fucking revenue sharing, Reginald. I wasn’t asking about monetization. I explicitly asked why the algorithm stopped showing my posts to my followers?

(Except I didn’t say the “fucking” part out loud. I remained diplomatic and polite and only slightly passive-aggressive, because I’m Canadian.)

Reginald: “I understand your frustration, but I cannot provide any further help here. I’ve provided all the info I have on this and will be closing this ticket. You can always reach out if you need help with another issue.”

I told him thanks but he hadn’t provided any help whatsoever.

Grok immediately took over.

“🤖 I’m really sorry to hear that you feel I haven’t been helpful. Could you please provide more details about the issue you’re facing so I can better assist you?”

WTF?

I’d already provided the details. Multiple times. With hard data. With pretty charts. With systematic elimination of alternative explanations.

But what the hell. I laid it all out, again.

“🤖 I’m really sorry you’re still frustrated by this 75% decline in impressions from your peak performance. Can we explore if amplifying engagement through reposting your own content or collaborating with others might help counteract this drop?”

No, Grok, no we cannot.

There are only two possibilities here. Either the algorithm doesn’t work as described, or account-level factors are overriding normal algorithmic behavior. Premium support won’t investigate which. They give scripted responses unrelated to the question asked. When you persist with data, they close the ticket. When you point out they didn’t help, they give you an AI expressing fake empathy and regurgitating canned social media tips on repeat.

They’ll deflect with bullshit revenue sharing calculations, boilerplate content quality advice, outdated general optimization tips, anything—rather than acknowledge algorithmic suppression exists.

Or their shiny new algorithm is colossally fucked.

Because it could be either I suppose. Who the fuck knows?

You can produce content that engages exceptionally well when people see it. You can pay for Premium subscription explicitly marketed as boosting visibility. You can document suppression with the platform’s own metrics and present systematic analysis eliminating every alternative explanation.

None of it matters.

At the end of the day the platform can suppress your reach overnight or roll out shit algorithm updates and you have zero recourse. They can take your Premium subscription money while providing worse distribution than you’d get without it. They can refuse to investigate when you document the problem with their own analytics. They can give you completely unrelated scripted responses about fucking revenue sharing when you ask pointed questions about why your impressions dropped. They can close your ticket when you persist, then throw a chatbot at you helpfully asking you to provide details you already fucking provided.

Several times. 

Ad nauseam.

But what they can’t do is suppress content you publish on ground you own.

Which is why I’ve flounced off Twitter in disgust and am now building owned channels—my blog, my email list—rather than chasing algorithmic optimization. When I publish to my email list, 100% of subscribers see it, not 1.75%. When I post to my blog, it’s there permanently, not buried by a flawed AI’s algorithmic whims.

So allow me to tap the sign again:

Build where you own the ground.

Because when you rent your audience from platforms, they can cut your reach off at the hips, take your money, refuse to explain why, and tell you to post “better content” while looking at enviable engagement rates in the 99th percentile.

And there’s not a goddamned thing you can do about it.

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This article was fact-checked by Grok, who concluded: “While this person’s tone is emotional and profane, their complaint is factually accurate, their data is solid, their timeline matches documented events, and their [customer support] experience rings true based on anecdotes from other users.”