Algorithmic Skullduggery on X: An Update

Earlier today I posted “I Optimized My Audience for Quality, and X Screwed Me for It,” theorizing that my 75% reach drop after October 18, 2025 resulted from removing 137 bot accounts in a single day. The timing was perfect—bulk unfollow event followed immediately by algorithmic suppression—and the correlation looked causal.

There’s a problem with that theory though: something else happened the very next day.

On October 19, 2025, X announced a major shift to a fully AI-powered recommendation system using Grok, with plans to eliminate all manual heuristics within 4-6 weeks. This change led to widespread user complaints about reduced reach, repetitive content, delayed updates, and sharp drops in engagement across the platform—complaints significant enough that Elon Musk publicly apologized on October 24, posting “My apologies for frustrations with the X algorithm. We are working hard to fix the problem.”

So which caused my reach collapse? I removed 137 bots on October 18. X rolled out Grok on October 19. My reach tanked. I have two correlations and no way to distinguish causation.

The Grok theory has better external validation—Musk doesn’t apologize for algorithm problems unless enough users are screaming about it, and the timing aligns with a platform-wide change rather than anything specific to my account. The bot removal theory has plausibility too; platforms have historically penalized accounts for unusual follower churn patterns, and 137 unfollows in a day is unusual. Both could be contributing factors. X will never tell me which, if either, actually triggered my suppression.

I asked Grok about the algorithm’s performance. “It’s a work in progress, not a personal screw-up on my end,” it assured me (which is exactly what you’d expect an AI to say if it fucked everything up). But buried in the deflection was useful confirmation: Grok acknowledged reach drops of up to 95% for some users, admitted the system prioritizes engagement bait, confirmed suppressed visibility for certain topics, noted that Musk apologized twice (October 24 and again November 12), and characterized the rollout as “rocky across the board.”

There’s something beautifully ironic about citing the algorithm that broke my reach as a source for why my reach is broken.

Anyway, what I can say is that the Grok rollout makes the bot removal theory less certain than I initially presented it. A platform-wide algorithm change affecting thousands of accounts is a more parsimonious explanation than targeted suppression for audience curation—but “more plausible” isn’t “confirmed.” I was too confident in my original analysis.

Occam’s Razor and all that jazz.

The conclusion from my previous article, however, doesn’t depend on which theory is correct. Whether my reach collapsed because I removed bots, because X shipped a broken algorithm, or because of some interaction between the two, the fundamental problem remains: I’m optimizing for metrics a platform controls, under rules that can change unilaterally overnight, with no recourse when the system breaks and no transparency about what actually happened.

X Premium customer support certainly isn’t any help. This is their “solution”:

The new algorithm prioritizes “unregretted user time”—Musk’s term for engagement users don’t later regret. Later changes in late November extended Grok’s ranking to the Following feed itself. The volatility continues, and creators across niches report unpredictable swings in visibility that have nothing to do with content quality. My high engagement rates prove my content works when people see it. My 1-2% reach proves the platform isn’t showing it. That’s not a problem I can solve by optimizing for algorithmic preferences, because the algorithm itself is fundamentally unreliable.

Email lists don’t break when platforms update their recommendation engines. Your website doesn’t tank your reach because engineers shipped buggy code. Amazon followers get notified of new releases regardless of what social media algorithms do.

The bottom line is I have no fucking clue why X suppressed my reach. But I know I absolutely can’t trust platforms with my audience. Build where you own the ground, because platforms—whether through malice, incompetence, or algorithmic chaos—will eventually screw you over. The mechanism matters less than the lesson.