X Content Governance Update: Three New Rules Redefining Value Hierarchy

Author: Ethan, Odaily (Planet Daily)

On January 22nd, the X platform updated its "Global Trends" page. Following a series of adjustments to content and incentive mechanisms, Odaily Planet Daily found that the platform has added a separate Meme category section. Various memes, humorous images, and short videos are presented in this section, allowing users to visually see the current meme themes and sentiment trends spreading both within and outside the platform.

At first glance, this seems more like an entertainment-oriented content compilation. However, when placed within X's recent intensive efforts to improve content governance, the emergence of this Meme section appears less "lightweight."

In X's product logic, content is being re-categorized: which constitutes emotional expression and which is considered information assets. The platform is beginning to provide clearer boundaries through the interface and the categories themselves.

It is against this backdrop that X has recently tightened its creator incentive and API usage rules, explicitly stating that replies and interactions will no longer contribute to revenue, and ultimately targeting the InfoFi application model that relies on external incentives to drive posting and interaction. Within the crypto community, these changes have been quickly interpreted as a signal—the platform is no longer willing to provide space for content paths that are "highly interactive and low in information density."

Judging from the details of the Meme being singled out, X's adjustment this time is not just about shutting down the old mechanism, but about building a new content order at the same time.

Why does oral masturbation fail? X's answer is more direct than "traffic throttling".

Over the past week, X has made a series of interconnected rule adjustments, pointing to the fact that X is redefining what kind of behavior is worth pricing.

The change is first reflected in the creator revenue rules. On January 19th, Nikita Bier, the product manager of X, clarified in response to user questions that creator revenue is currently calculated solely based on the number of views of their content on the homepage timeline; exposure generated by replies is no longer counted towards revenue. This essentially overturns a long-held, accepted growth logic—interaction itself no longer has monetization value.

Nikita Bier, product manager for X, responded to netizens' questions in a post on X.

Under the new pricing system, whether it's high-frequency replies, concentrated spamming, or maintaining activity through low-cost content like "gm" and "+1", as long as the content cannot get onto the homepage timeline, it will no longer be considered a valid contribution by the platform.

This change did not occur in isolation. In the subsequent explanation, X further elaborated on the underlying logic: the amount of content that ordinary users can actually browse each day is extremely limited. Excessive posting and frequent interaction do not expand influence; instead, they prematurely deplete the account's daily exposure quota. When truly important information is released, the account often "has no quota left."

In other words, in X's judgment, excessive interaction is not suppressed, but is regarded as an inefficient or even self-destructive behavior pattern.

This stance echoes Nikita Bier's previous public criticisms of the crypto community. In his view, the decline in the influence of crypto tweets is not due to deliberate suppression by platform algorithms, but rather to the self-depletion caused by the community's long-term reliance on low-value interactions.

Judging from the results, X did not deny the existence of "verbal masturbation," but chose a more direct and calmer approach: no longer paying for this behavior.

When reply views are removed from the incentive system, the content model of "profiting from interaction" naturally loses its foundation. The so-called "end of the era of verbal manipulation" is not a targeted purge, but an inevitable result of the adjustment of the pricing system.

The real context for the emergence of Smart Cashtags: X wanted to turn "market sentiment" into a consumable object.

While reshaping the rules for incentivizing creators, X is also simultaneously advancing another more directional product path—Smart Cashtags.

According to Nikita Bier, the product manager for X, this feature allows users to directly tag specific tokens or smart contracts when posting market data or asset-related content. Users can click on the tag in the timeline to view the real-time price of the corresponding asset, as well as all related discussions on the platform. This feature is currently in the testing and feedback phase, and the official team has confirmed that version V1 will be released, providing a relatively clear launch expectation (expected next month).

This means that Smart Cashtags is no longer in the proof-of-concept stage, but has entered the final polishing stage before its functionality is finalized.

Related tweets and Smart Cashtags test page

Initially, the community viewed it primarily as a market data tool to improve user experience. However, as the discussion deepened, the focus of criticism gradually shifted to several more fundamental issues:

—If the assets are not yet listed on a major exchange, does X have reliable data coverage capabilities?

—Does its price and on-chain information rely solely on centralized exchanges?

—Will this be further extended to wallets or transaction execution layers in the future?

Nikita Bier provided a relatively clear response to the first two questions. He stated that the API used by X will be able to process "almost anything minted on-chain in real time," implying that Smart Cashtags' data sources are not limited to centralized trading platforms, but rather have the ability to directly access on-chain information.

When asked about whether X would support self-custodied wallets or transactions within the CEX widget, he did not give a direct answer, only responding with a "following" emoji. This deliberately reserved attitude, however, fueled further speculation within the community about X's next move.

If Smart Cashtags are placed back into X’s existing strategic trajectory, this “blank space” does not seem out of place.

By 2025, X had obtained remittance-related licenses in more than 40 states in the United States and was simultaneously advancing the compliance construction of the X Money payment system. At the time, these actions were more seen as part of the "Everything App" narrative, and were still far from the content ecosystem.

By January 2026, the progress of Smart Cashtags began to become clearer: the functionality was discussed publicly for the first time, followed by supplementary details on the API layer, along with information on compliance and legal aspects. By late January, although still in the testing phase, the official timeline had been clearly defined.

Odaily Planet Daily believes that this further illustrates that Smart Cashtags is not an isolated product attempt, but rather X laying the infrastructure in advance for the "content × finance" interface.

When placed alongside adjustments such as creator incentive rules and the InfoFi API cleanup, its positioning becomes clear: X is not in a hurry to personally intervene in transaction execution, but is trying to compress assets, prices, and market sentiment into a single clickable and traceable content node.

In this structure, the value of content is no longer simply determined by the amount of interaction, but rather by whether it can form a continuous and consumable flow of information and narrative around a particular asset. In this sense, Smart Cashtags are not tools for casual chatting, but rather entry points reserved for specific content formats.

After the algorithm was "exposed," the right to exposure did not become more democratic.

Besides Smart Cashtags, another recent change that has been repeatedly mentioned in X is the official open-sourcing of its recommendation algorithm.

In late January, the X Engineering team announced that it had released the latest version of its platform algorithm, which uses the same Transformer architecture as xAI's Grok model. Elon Musk subsequently stated that the algorithm was still "quite clumsy," but open-sourcing it meant users could clearly see its optimization path. For a long time, content throttling and topic suppression have often been attributed to "black box algorithms"; algorithm transparency, at least, removes the hidden rules and makes the path traceable.

X's latest publicly available platform algorithm - GitHub repository homepage

However, open-source algorithms do not mean that exposure rights are distributed equally.

Almost simultaneously, X is pushing forward with a systemic upgrade to its "interest discovery" mechanism. The core goal is to allow new accounts to find content of interest more quickly, without having to spend a long time following and filtering. When organizing timelines, the algorithm is shifting from relying on "who you follow" to "what the system thinks you might want to see."

Within this framework, whether content gains exposure depends on two key criteria: comprehensibility and consumability.

• Comprehensibility: The content has a clear structure, complete information, and is easy for algorithms to recognize and classify.
• Consumability: Content can be absorbed, understood, and interacted with by users in a short period of time, forming an effective information flow.

In other words, exposure is no longer determined by "interaction volume," but by whether content can be efficiently identified, distributed, and attract an audience. This signifies a shift from the previous model of "whoever is more active gets more attention" to a distribution logic centered on the intrinsic value of the content itself.

When platforms simultaneously tighten interactive incentives, structure asset narratives, and strengthen interest-based recommendation mechanisms, a new selection logic has taken shape. Under this system, it's no surprise that "talking and laughing" is naturally excluded from mainstream exposure paths.

In conclusion: This isn't about reversing opinions, but rather a repricing of content value.

From tightening creator incentive rules and open-sourcing algorithms to the gradual advancement of the Smart Cashtags feature, and then to the separate creation of the Meme section on January 22, X is gradually piecing together a clear path.

Low-value interactions are being stripped away, assets and emotions are being restructured, and algorithms and interest discovery mechanisms are being brought to the forefront—all these adjustments point to a core outcome: platforms are redefining what kind of content deserves to be distributed, priced, and seen.

Under the new order, memes are categorized as expressions of emotion, and financial and crypto content is required to have a clear structure and direction; the power of exposure shifts from "who is more active" to "who is easier to understand and consume." Platforms no longer pay for noise or mere participation.

As analyzed in a previous Odaily article, "X Ends InfoFi Incentive Model, Marking the End of the Era of 'Talking it Out'," the end of the "talking it out" era is not the end, but rather the first perceptible signal of X's content value system restructuring. With the implementation of new rules, the platform is building a value system that is more focused on the content itself rather than interactive behavior.

For creators and the industry, this means that future visibility on X will no longer depend on quantity, but on whether content can be recognized by algorithms, absorbed by audiences, and generate sustainable value. This new order represents both a reclaiming of platform sovereignty and a profound reshaping of the content ecosystem.