Catturd — a right-wing pseudonymous account — routinely outperforms the New York Times on X. The Times has built a following of 53 million accounts, but its posts typically generate a few hundred likes or replies. Nate Silver, the statistician behind FiveThirtyEight and the Silver Bulletin newsletter, tracked X's top engagement accounts for 2026 and found them dominated by low-quality, highly partisan content. His verdict: the platform has mutated into something strange and self-defeating.
Silver uses the "island effect" from ecology to explain it. Isolated environments produce strange evolutionary mutations — think flightless birds or dwarf elephants. X, cut off from meaningful feedback from the broader world, has optimized for a very specific kind of engagement that rewards outrage and performs poorly everywhere else. As evidence, Silver notes his own newsletter: social media drove 0.7% of his traffic in March, yet his readership grew 40% year over year. The algorithm isn't surfacing his work; his audience is finding him anyway.
Elon Musk has a built-in algorithmic boost for his own account. Silver notes that liberal accounts have emerged on X as a Waluigi version of conservative influencers — same reflexive tactics, opposite politics, mirror-image unreality.
Bluesky's CEO announced stepping down last month, and the platform is shrinking. There's no alternative pulling people away from X — just a slow, weird drift toward irrelevance.
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