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.
See all twenty-nine prices
These are X's own numbers in X's code. Zero means X counts it, but pays nothing for it today.
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.
Four more things happen after that
X works out a number for one reader. Then it does four more things to that number before anybody sees anything.
- A bad number gets crushed. If your post comes out below zero for somebody, it is not just pushed down a bit. It drops below every single post that came out above zero.
- One small account gets one lift. Out of everything X gathered for that reader, exactly one post gets pushed up to match the sixteenth best. Not one for each of you. One, shared by every account with a thousand followers or fewer, and it goes to whichever of those posts is already scoring highest. It has to be one you started yourself, and it has to not be in the bottom fifteen percent of that batch.
- Strangers pay less. Shown to somebody who does not follow you, your post is worth three quarters of what it would be worth to a follower.
- Being too much like a better post gets you dropped. A last step compares your post against the better ones already picked. If yours sits too close to one of them, it goes. Not for being bad. For being near something better.
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 the For You feed 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 the For You feed stops showing it 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-best post in this reader’s batch
Three of your own posts already score higher for this reader. So X cuts what this one is worth to about a third, before it even competes.
change one thing Be the only post of yours in the batch.
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. It sorts your posts by score for that reader and cuts each one after the first. Your second-best is worth about five eighths. Your third about four tenths. It is your rank among your own posts in that batch, not the order you wrote them. 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.
gate 9 · Communities
The new robot cannot count. I asked it four times.
posted inside a Community
Nobody outside that Community will ever be shown it. It does not go on X's list at all.
change one thing Post it to your own feed instead.
The new robot cannot count. I asked it four times.
Now strangers can be shown it.
When X builds the list it shows strangers from, it skips Community posts. Same as replies. Same as reposts. It counts them as skipped and writes down nothing.
gate 10 · Replying to big accounts
This is not what the numbers say.
replying under an account with a million followers
Because that account is huge, X sends your reply to a separate model that scores and ranks the replies under it. And it still cannot reach strangers.
change one thing Say it as your own post instead.
Everybody is quoting that number today. It is a guess somebody made in 2019, not a measurement.
No spam check. And now it can reach people who do not follow you.
If the post you are replying under belongs to somebody with more than a hundred and twenty thousand followers, your reply goes to a separate model that reads and ranks every reply under that post. Under a smaller account it does not. So the big account you were aiming at is the thing that gets your reply judged against everyone else's.
gate 11 · Posting too much
Alright, one more thing about the robot.
your fifty-first post in two days
X only holds fifty of your posts for the people who follow you. Your fifty-first pushes your first one out of the pile.
change one thing Post less in two days.
Alright, one more thing about the robot.
All of them stay in the pile.
For the people who follow you, X holds fifty of your own posts and thirty of your replies and reposts, going back two days. Go past that and your newest post shoves your oldest one out.
gate 12 · Editing
The new robot cannot cout. I asked it four times.
you spot the typo an hour later and fix it
The version people were already seeing is dropped. Only the fixed one is left.
change one thing Read it once before you post it.
The new robot cannot count. I asked it four times.
Nothing gets dropped.
Only the newest version of an edited post is kept. Every earlier one is dropped, and there is no exception for the person who wrote it. So you cannot tell by looking at your own timeline.
also · How long it lives
The new robot cannot count. I asked it four times.
written as words
The For You feed stops showing it after two days, and it drops off the list X pulls strangers from. Your followers can still scroll back to it in their Following tab, which is newest first and reaches back a year.
change one thing Say the same thing over a video.
The new robot cannot count. I asked it four times.
It stays on that list for up to thirty days. The For You feed still stops showing it after two days, so this buys a longer life in the pool, not a longer run in front of people.
Two different clocks, and people mix them up. One is the For You feed, and it is the same for everybody: nothing older than two days is shown there, video or not. The Following tab is not on that clock. The other is the list X keeps posts on so it can pull them up later, and video sits on that list for up to thirty days instead of two. 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.
Eight smaller things, all true
None of these are big enough for a pair. All of them are real.
- Two @ names sends you to a spam checker. Two. Tagging a couple of friends is enough. Big accounts get taken out of that check. You do not.
- A link that passes through a bad address on the way gets your post marked. It does not matter where the link ends up. One bad stop on the journey is enough, and the mark does not expire.
- A bad pinned link keeps punishing you. Every single time you follow somebody new, X looks at your pinned post again. If the link in it is bad, the mark comes back. Forever, until you unpin it.
- The little preview picture on a link can get your post covered up. You never uploaded that picture. You still get the cover.
- An image buys 0.05 and can cost you twenty-eight days. Somebody opening your photo is worth 0.05. That is the smallest price on the whole list. Copying your link is worth 20. The real cost is the clock: a post only keeps its thirty-day place on the list X pulls strangers from if every single thing attached to it is video running longer than ten seconds. One photo, one GIF, one nine-second clip, and it drops back to two days. Both of those are time on the list, not time in front of people: the For You feed stops showing it after two days either way. Post a picture because a person needs to see it, never because the feed pays for it.
- X has two feeds and this page describes one of them. Everything here is about For You, the one X picks for people. The Following tab is different: it is newest first, nothing is scored, and it reaches back a year. Your two-day clock is a For You clock. On Following your followers can still scroll back and find you.
- Lock your account and strangers see nothing. Not one post. Ever. Only the people already following you.
- Muted words are checked before any scoring. If somebody muted a word you used, your post is gone for them before X even starts working out numbers.
- There is a list of 2,388 accounts written into the code. Quote one of them, or reply under one, and your post is dropped. It works that way everywhere in the world, not just where those accounts are.
Six things people say that are not in the code
Every one of these gets repeated constantly. None of them is in what X published.
- The blue check does not change your number. Everything X adds up is one short list and the paid subscription is not on it. X does say paid accounts get pushed up in the replies under a post. That part is somewhere else, in code X did not publish, so nobody can check it.
- There is no hashtag rule. None. Not a good one, not a bad one. X's scoring never looks at them.
- Nothing turns your post down as it ages. There is no fading formula in the code. But X does tell the guessing part how old your post is, hour by hour, so age is not invisible either. The hard stop is real. At two days it is gone from the For You feed.
- No rule matches your language to the reader's. Nothing in the code says show this to people who speak what you wrote in. But X does tell the guessing part what language your post is in, and what language the reader uses. What it does with those is not published.
- There is no dial. There is a switch. X cannot turn you down a little. But it can put a mark on your whole account, and then every post you write is hidden from everybody who does not already follow you. The people who do follow you still see it. So do you. That is why you cannot tell.
- A pile of people reporting you does not sink your post. X explains this in its own notes. The system guesses how likely you are to report something, one person at a time. It does not count up other people's reports.
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
The Team That Cannot Disagree. Agent teams are one mind wearing several names. September 4, 2026
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