UX minimizes payments for accounts that “clutter the timeline” with clickbait and quick news coverage, according to product head Nikita Bier.
Bier wrote on Saturday that “[a]all affiliates have had their payouts reduced by 60% this cycle” and said they would see another 20% reduction in the next lead cycle. He also said the Elon Musk-owned social network would cut payouts to “seditious posters who use ‘🚨BREAKING’ in every post.”
“It was very clear: flooding the timeline with 100’s of retweets and clicks from original creators every day and harming the growth of new authors,” said Bier, adding, “X will never break speech or access – but we will not compensate for the mistreatment of the program or our users.”
Bier’s comments come after several news accounts started reporting that they received emails from X informing them that their accounts had been monetized.
Dominick McGee, who writes under the name Dom Lucre, wrote, “🔥🚨BREAKING […] I was the first demo creator to be monetized on this platform and I was for a year. I found it and I was just lost without understanding. How is this possible? I’m one of the hardest working creators at X.”
McGee’s account has 1.6 million followers on X. He became famous for posting conspiracy theories related to the 2020 presidential election, and while he was temporarily banned from X in 2023 and demonetized in 2024, he told the New York Times last year that he was making $55,000 a year from the platform.
In response to Bier’s post, McGee complained that X seems to be listening to “complaints from people who have no creative agenda in this app.” And while he admits that declaring every post top news would be “clickbait,” he said, “I post hundreds of times and very few GET SUCCESS.” (Other X users seem to disagree, adding a public note linking him to the 91 times he used the word “CONTINUED” in the past week.)
Techcrunch event
San Francisco, CA
|
October 13-15, 2026
Some users said they were caught up in X’s crack, with an account called PoliMath, “I guess I appreciate what Nikita is trying to do there but I just had my lowest pay in a long time so I’m afraid I’m somehow caught in this ‘aggregator’ bucket.” The narrative states that they are “not ‘joiners’ by any stretch of the imagination,” though they do agree to have a paid relationship with Kalshi.
Bier’s comments also came after a new debate about the value of the X platform, where data analyst and expert Nate Silver lamented how difficult it has become to drive traffic from X to other websites. He also pointed to the dominance of right-wing accounts on X, declaring, “I think I had an idea of how bad it was, but jeez, this is what you get when the ecosystem is broken.”
Bier said Silver’s information was untrue and Musk called his post “bullshit,” although other analyzes supported his claims.
