How X decides who sees your posts.
X published the code that decides who sees your posts. Hardly anybody has read it. So here is one post, nine times over. Each time, one small thing about it is different. Each time, a different number of people end up seeing it. None of this is about writing better. All of it is about what you do with the post.
X pays in points
Somebody likes your post. Somebody else sends it to a friend. X pays points for both. It does not pay the same for both.
Here are four of the prices.
Look at that list one more time.
A like is the cheapest thing on it. The thing everybody chases is the thing worth least.
And the bad one is bigger than all three good ones put together.
There are twenty-nine prices in all. Every one of them is inside X Preflight, with the real name X gave it.
So what is the most points a post can get?
Here is the part almost nobody knows.
X is not counting people. It is guessing.
Say you write a post. Before one single person has seen it, X picks somebody who might.
Then it guesses about that one person. How likely is this person to send it to a friend? To reply? To like it? To mute you?
It adds those guesses up. That is that person's number.
Then it throws that number away and does the whole thing again for the next person. And again. And again.
So think about a joke.
The same joke makes one person laugh out loud. The next person just stares at you.
So how funny is that joke? Out of ten?
You cannot answer. A joke does not have a funny number. It only has one for each person who hears it.
Your post is the same. It does not have a score. It never did. X makes a brand new one for every single person it thinks about showing it to.
So when somebody offers to tell you your post's score, they are offering you something that does not exist. This page cannot tell you either. Nobody can, because there is no number to tell.
Change one thing, change who sees your post
The same post, twice. One thing changed. A different ending. That is the whole lesson, nine times, and every one of them is a rule published by X.
gate 1 · On the list
My microwave is smarter than this.
posted as a reply under the company's big announcement
Only people who already follow you can ever see it. It never goes on the list X uses to show posts to strangers.
change one thing Say it as your own post instead of a reply.
I asked the new AI to count the letters in the word strawberry. It got it wrong. Twice.
Now it can reach people who have never heard of you.
X keeps a list of posts it is allowed to show to strangers. Replies never go on that list. Neither do reposts. Only posts you start yourself. And even then, most of that list only opens once somebody likes your post. The first like is a real door, not a nice extra.
gate 2 · Still alive
The new robot goes on sale Friday. I have some questions.
posted on Monday
By Friday, everyone is finally talking about it. But your post is more than two days old by then, and X has stopped showing it to anybody.
change one thing Post it Friday, not Monday.
The new robot goes on sale today. I have some questions.
It is fresh on the day people are actually looking.
X starts a clock the second you hit send. After two days it stops showing your post to anybody. Nothing restarts that clock. So if people get interested on day three, there is nothing left for them to find.
gate 3 · Eighteen checks
I gave the new AI forty questions a nine-year-old can answer. Full results for subscribers.
locked to paying subscribers
It is pulled out of the feed of everybody who is not paying you. They can still reach it another way, but X will never put it in front of them.
change one thing Let everybody read it.
I gave the new AI forty questions a nine-year-old can answer. It got eleven wrong. Here they are.
Everyone can see it, so it competes like everything else.
X runs eighteen quick checks before it decides what to put in anyone's feed. One of them looks for subscriber-only posts. If the reader is not a subscriber, out it comes. This happens before any scoring. So the post never even gets in the race.
gate 4 · Scored
Anyone excited about this thing is a moron who has never done a real day's work in their life.
Nothing removes it. But X is guessing about each reader. And the guesses that go against you are worth far more than the ones that go for you.
change one thing Same opinion, without calling anyone a moron.
I do not think this thing is close to ready, and I think the excitement is going to age badly.
The guesses that hurt drop for readers who would have flinched. By how much, nobody can say, and it is a different amount for every single person.
This is the joke problem again. X is guessing about one person at a time. Make a reader flinch and the guesses that hurt you go up for that person. How far up? Nobody can say. It is a different amount for every reader.
gate 5 · Top fifty
One more thing about that robot and then I will stop.
your fourth post today
Three of your own posts already sit above it for this reader. So X cuts what this one is worth to about a third, before it even competes.
change one thing Your only post today, not your fourth.
One more thing about that robot and then I will stop.
Your post goes in at full value. Whether full value is enough still cannot be known.
X does not want one person filling somebody's feed. So your second post is worth about two thirds of your first. Your third is worth about four tenths. After that, X keeps the best fifty posts out of about two thousand it gathered for that one reader.
gate 6 · Not deleted
Look what it drew when I asked for a hand. Six fingers. Six.
with the picture attached
People who follow you see it behind a cover they have to tap. For everybody else, the same post is removed completely.
change one thing Leave the picture off.
I asked it to draw a hand. It gave the hand six fingers. Nobody at the company noticed before shipping.
No warning label, so it is allowed everywhere.
One warning label. Two completely different results. If somebody already follows you, they get a cover they can tap to see it anyway. If they do not follow you, the post is just gone.
gate 7 · One per thread
1. Everyone is wrong about this robot. 2. Here is what it actually does. 3. Here is what it cannot do. 4. Here is why that matters. 5. Anyway, buy nothing.
a five-part thread
Parts two through five might be the best of it. Does not matter. Only one post out of the whole thread can turn up in anybody's feed.
change one thing Post them separately instead of as a thread.
Everyone is wrong about this robot, and it is the same mistake people made about the last one.
They are separate conversations now, so more than one can appear. They still compete with each other.
After scoring, X sorts the posts by which conversation each one belongs to. Then it keeps the best one from each conversation and throws the rest away. A thread is one conversation. So only one post out of it can ever appear.
gate 8 · One of thirty-five
This is the worst take I have read all year and I have read a lot of them.
quoting the person who wrote it
Your post picks up the worst safety rating of whatever you quoted. That keeps you out of the best spots on the page.
change one thing Say what they said instead of quoting them.
Somebody argued today that the robot is already better than a person at this job. Here is the test that shows it is not.
You keep your own rating and every spot is open to you. Whether you make the final cut still cannot be known.
Quote somebody and you take on their safety rating, not just your own. If theirs is worse, yours is now worse too. Then the whole list gets cut to thirty-five, and the ads take some of those thirty-five with them.
also · How long it lives
The new robot cannot count. I asked it four times.
written as words
It sits on X's list for a day or two. Then it is gone for good, and nobody can find it again.
change one thing Say the same thing over a video.
The new robot cannot count. I asked it four times.
Now the same post can sit on that list for up to thirty days instead of two.
Words drop off X's list after a day or two. A video can stay on it for thirty days. But it only counts if every single thing attached to the post is a video, and every one of them runs longer than ten seconds. Add one photo, or one short clip, or a GIF, and you are back to two days.
X Preflight will not write your post.
Every other tool like this will also write the post for you. Here is why that is a bad trade. X now puts a mark on writing that reads like a machine made it. That mark sits on the post for thirty days. There is a second rule that marks the whole account instead. Also thirty days. While that mark is on you, nothing you post reaches anybody who does not already follow you.
And there is a simpler reason. The words are the only part of any of this that is yours. So this one shows you the machine. It tells you what the machine will do with what you wrote. Then it hands the pen back.
Two boxes. Grade my draft. Find the angle, from someone else's post, for a reply that earns a follow or a quote that travels. One rule. Never the sentence.
Try X Preflight on your own post
Paste in anything you are about to post. X Preflight runs these same checks on your real words. It tells you which ones you are about to trip, and what to change.
It will not write the post. That part stays yours.
For agents
The same read is an open API and an MCP server. An agent can check a post before it publishes it, the way it would check code before shipping it.
curl -X POST https://kevinhoff.com/api/grade \
-H 'content-type: application/json' \
-d '{"text":"the draft","pinned":false}'
openapi.json · mcp · llms.txt · the ledger as JSON · ai.json
Writing
It Scores the Reader. X published the ranking code. It does not say what everyone assumed it would say. September 3, 2026
Recursive Self Emergence. Why the bound belongs in the noun. September 1, 2026
The Frame Problem. Why the good ones get missed. March 28, 2026
Mirror or Entity. Most people are building a noisy copy of themselves. February 15, 2026