If you spend as much time on the forum as I do, you've probably noticed the bizarre new product development cycle on X. Ever since Elon Musk took the helm, a casual conversation on the timeline could turn into a major corporate policy change in the blink of an eye. Executives casually wander into a random thread, absorbing user feedback, and suddenly, a major feature is shipped.
This over-reactive approach has intensified since Nikita Beer joined the fray. We've already seen fast-track features like a dislike button for spam comments stemming from timeline complaints. Now, Bear has joined another random conversation to share some worrying, raw data about a growing nightmare on the platform: The revenue sharing program is destroying the answers section.
It all started fairly organically. One user shared a “Happy Tweeting” tip, recommending muting a series of common bot phrases like “vibe-code” and “is dead.” This prompted a wave of users to reveal their block and mute lists. One user came up with a shocking statistic: 3,047 blocked accounts, 17,665 silenced accounts and 200 silenced words.
His caption painted a grim picture: “99% bots. So I blocked about 2.5% of my followers and didn't even come close to stopping the AI replies.”
That's when Nikita Beer spoke out and pulled back the curtain on X's internal metrics regarding the much-discussed creator payout model.
“Rave Share is killing the answer section,” Bear said bluntly. According to the data they shared, users who are paid by X are 2 times more likely to be marked as spam than users who post for free. Even more wild? If the user is replying to a post originating from a country that is not their own, the spam flag rate increases 100 times higher.
Nigeria, South Africa and India lead this group
Bear didn't just skip the lesson; He brought the receipts. They shared two internal charts detailing the home countries of revenue-share users most frequently reported as spam by American and Japanese users.
When US users press the “Report Spam” button on a verified reply, the data shows exactly who is on the receiving end. Nigeria tops the list by a significant margin with about 12% of spam reports. South Africa is in second place with about 11%, while India is a little behind with 10.5%.
This trend is even more aggressive in Japan. When Japanese users report spam in their replies, about 16% of those accounts are based in Nigeria. Indonesia (13%) and India (12.2%) are at second and third place respectively.
If you're a heavy X user, this data validates what your eyes have been seeing for months. Accounts from these sectors have mastered the deep art of cultivating engagement. By spamming replies to viral tweets in high-end advertising markets (such as the US and Japan), they artificially inflate their impressions to secure a larger share of the revenue share. As Bear said, this strategy is “crooking out human posts” and fixing it will naturally boost organic reach for everyone else.
From a local perspective, it is a great relief to see Kenya completely absent from the list of these top offenders. While this certainly doesn't mean Kenyans aren't clamoring for impressions, the data clearly shows that we are not operating the large-scale, cross-border spam farms that are currently plaguing the platform's top creators.
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When you analyze Bear's data, the true meaning of the sudden rollout of several controversial X features begins to make sense. Platforms are struggling to build fences around this exact behavior.
This engagement farming epidemic is a direct catalyst for forcing X locations on the profile so that users can immediately identify spam from outside the region. That's why we recently gained the ability to lock answers to a specific country or region, allowing creators in the US or Japan to close the door to international answer-men.
It also provides important context for the platform's most controversial, recently halted plan. X was actively preparing to give more weight to local impressions than global impressions for creator payments. Elon Musk moved to halt the rollout only after massive opposition from legitimate global creators who feared losing their livelihoods.
X is currently walking on the rope. The platform wants to remain the global city crossroads, but as Nikita Bear's data proves, paying people to stand at that intersection has given some people an incentive to yell at everyone else. Until X finds a way to algorithmically punish this cross-border farming without penalizing authentic international conversations, the mute and block buttons will remain our best line of defense.
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