X may finally be rewarding originality, and Nikita Bier thinks talking videos are the answer

Ever since X announced its Creator Revenue Sharing program, the platform has taken a huge hit in the quality of posts that pop up on the feeds. Some people have gone as far as to say that it’s one of the biggest mistakes the platform has made. 

If you use X regularly, you also might have noticed that the For You feed hardly shows posts from folks you actually follow. Instead, it bumps up low-effort posts that are solely designed to get you to engage with the post.

X may finally be trying to fix that. Nikita Bier, the platform’s head of product, is pushing creators to make more “talking videos” — simple clips where someone just looks at the camera and speaks in their own voice. He called it an easy way to pull in millions of impressions even with basically no followers.

Elon Musk also backed this up with a quote-post where he said “Yes,” to the suggestion.

Bier doubled down in a separate thread with the account Daily Loud. The account had argued X’s whole setup was only a money-saving measure for them, as the platform could avoid big payouts while creators stayed put for their existing fanbases. Bier shot back at this. Copy-and-paste jobs that add zero unique commentary just steal impressions from the real creators, he said. “Our users derive no value from this.”

When Daily Loud replied they’d tweak the wording and add commentary, Bier laid out the new reality. Reposts or anything pulled from a third-party network now face up to a 90 percent deduction on impressions. His advice was pretty much the same as before: record original videos with your own voice-over. “We want net new content on the app.”

Bier also made a separate post where he pushed back hard against the idea that adding new communities, like women, vloggers, and whoever, will wreck the experience for current users. The algorithm already serves separate niches you never even see, he explained. More people online doesn’t shrink anyone else’s slice. It just means more impressions overall.

That said, plenty of X users are against the whole “create original videos” push, and rightfully so. A lot of people use X to quickly catch up on things happening around the world or to just sh**post. That’s how the platform thrived for years. But with the product head now asking users to publish original videos to reap the rewards, folks think it’ll just turn the platform into yet another TikTok and Instagram alternative.

This original video’s suggestion comes at a time when creators are already confused with all the mixed signals the platform has been sending to creators about its algorithm. One satirical post laid out the supposed “algorithm rules” in a long, contradictory list — be original but not artificial, active but not too active — and it hit a nerve with a lot of people who feel like they’re constantly guessing.

Whether X can actually pull this off is still an open question. The platform has been trying to clean up its feed for months, and results so far have been mixed. But the combination of algorithmic action against spam and public nudges from the likes of Nikita Bier at least suggests the effort is more serious this time around.

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