X is not like other platforms. It’s not even close. It’s the signal in a collapsing system of noise, and that’s exactly what people outside it don’t understand.
As a tech product, Twitter never was particularly remarkable. It could largely attribute its success to the fact that it was so early in the game. Sure, it was (and X still is) the only “direct line” to world leaders from Vatican to White House, and you could already see certain crowds like journalists and tech community to gather there. However, signal-to-noise ratio was abysmally low from the get-go, and the legacy 140-character format (imposed by SMS protocol’s limit) didn’t help.
The company got bloated. Innovation died. It got ravaged by the parasitic ideology that swept across most of Silicon Valley in the 2010s. So called “Verification” system was based on the whims of the ideologues, where blue checkmarks were given and taken away based on reasons we can only guess, all the while the regular users got shadownbanned or worse. At least now we know (thanks to the #TwitterFiles) the latter happen at least partly by US government pressure, and to his credit, being a cog in the censorship industrial complex wasn’t something that the founder Jack Dorsey was particularly happy with.
But the platform was still worth saving. Twitter had never made any money, and everyone knew it was a bad business deal for Musk. He himself said the primary reason for the purchase was to make sure there’s at least one bastion of free speech among the popular social media platforms. As Bret Weinstein says, zero is a special number. if even one platform (or university, newsroom, science journal…) allows truth-seekers to speak freely, the establishment can’t own the entire Overton window.
Joe Rogan said it bluntly: “Elon may have very well saved humanity in some way.”
That might sound dramatic, but I bet the impacts of the $44B deal will be studied by historians. It was a fork in the timeline, for sure.
The Signal Divide
Under the CEO Linda Yaccarino, X has been shipping updates faster than Twitter ever did, even after Musk slashed 80% of the staff practically overnight. Anyone who’s worked in tech knows how insane that is.
But speed of development doesn’t explain the signal clarity. I first saw Farzad draw the parallel between X and “the signal” in the context of the 2024 U.S. election. Needless to say, the outcome didn’t surprise anyone who was paying attention on the platform.
And yes, I’m aware of the observational bias here. If you’re not on X and still reading, I commend you!
The divide between X users and everyone else isn’t just political or American, as Zuby also pointed out recently. The replies are worth skimming too, with a wide range of firsthand takes that echo the same theme.
The gap isn’t just informational. It’s cultural. At least in the West, X has become its own layer of shared context.
There’s been talk of a cultural vibe shift on X. You can feel it between the posts. I don’t think the platform drives the zeitgeist, but it’s clearly more attuned to it than anywhere else.
As a non-American, I’m not sure this is the dawn of the golden age Trump promised in his Inaugural Address, but I am seeing a dawn of something on X. And over the past couple of months, that something has started showing up also in the mainstream.
From macro to micro level, I see friends, family, and colleagues talking about events or memes that were already circulating on X days if not weeks earlier. That lag didn’t exist in the Twitter era, at least not like this. It’s a byproduct of what X has become: the platform of primary sources. It’s strange to be in the know without even trying.
Twitter Is Dead. That Was Just the Beginning.
Since Musk’s takeover in 2022, the media has been obsessed with declaring X dead. They weren’t wrong about Twitter. That part did die, but the platform didn’t. Headlines claimed users had fled to Mastodon, Threads, or even BlueSky. Reality tells a different story.
Monthly active users are estimated between 500 and 800 million. In 2024, X doubled Twitter’s highest annual profit. If there was an exodus, it was short-lived. If anything, it sharpened the signal. It removed noise and left behind higher-value discourse.
One real consequence has been ideological. Many social media managers, aligned with anti-Musk narratives, took their employers off X. They moved to niche platforms with a fraction of the audience. I expect most of them to come crawling back sooner than later.
“What about all the misinformation?” That’s the default criticism. But it’s outdated. Community Notes is the most effective system available for correcting low-quality or malicious content. It applies to everyone, whether you are a random anonymous user or the president of a country.
There are no third-party fact-checkers (which are notoriously susceptible to bias) or corporate editorial boards. Just community-generated context, rated by consensus. The system is so good, that Meta is now copying the model. I wrote about this in the F-Alert February 2025 Cyber Threat Bulletin. Unfortunately, most journalist covering Meta’s decision were no longer on X, and simply didn’t understand how Community Notes works.
Then there’s the algorithm, or the “For You” feed, as X calls it. Just like LLMs, this feed is a mirror of your inputs, and unfortunately many won’t like what they see that mirror. In another exceptional move, X’s recommendation algorithm is completely open source, so this claim can be verified. Use mute and block aggressively, and think them as inputs of the algorithm.
Freedom of speech doesn’t mean you have to listen to low-agency anons.
I’ve been on the platform for over 13 years. The best advice I can give is this: curate ruthlessly. I follow no more than 250 accounts. When I want to add someone new, I remove the account that has provided the least value lately.
As a result, every time I open X, I get more out of it than I put in. That is how it should be.
Attention is an investment. Every time you open an app, you spend time, energy, and focus. If all you get back is a few chuckles, a jolt of outrage, or a sore thumb, you lost the exchange.
Be honest: when was the last time you came out ahead after opening LinkedIn? Can you even remember?
The Signal Beckons
To summarize, there isn’t just an information gap between X users and everyone else. There’s also a speed gap. Even when outsiders eventually get the same facts, they’re often days behind. And then there’s the biggest gap of all: the one between what X actually is and what non-users believe it to be, based on the headlines and caricatures they’ve absorbed.
It gets stranger. On platforms like BlueSky, users go out of their way to keep outsiders out (including making violent threats). On X, the opposite is true. People want others to join. They want you in the conversation. They want friction, argument, better inputs. That openness is part of the signal.
Anyone building anything serious in tech, especially with AI, is on X. If a founder isn’t there, it raises eyebrows. People ask why. They expect participation.
That should tell you something.
Joel Latto 
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