If they aren’t going to end the monetization program here, which I think they should, then at the very least they need to significantly raise the standard for who can monetize. The whole point of “revenue sharing” is that the people driving revenue should get a piece of it. But most of these engagement farmers and slop merchants aren’t really driving revenue. Nobody is coming to X to read their stuff. If it happens to pop up in your feed, maybe you interact with it. But their content is totally interchangeable. Just mindless filler. The more you incentivize and reward that kind of content, the more of it you get. They need to come up with a way to incentivize actual high quality content. If they can’t, the whole program should be scrapped.

Just spit balling but what about paying a relatively high premium based on the number of views you get on your profile? There are a handful of accounts here interesting enough to me that I’ll go right to their profile to see what they’ve posted over the past day or two. That’s what we should be rewarding. The people who are so interesting that you come to this site to see what they have to say. Nobody goes to the profiles of the engagement farmers and slop merchants because nobody actually cares what they have to say. And yet some of them make thousands of dollars posting bullshit nobody cares about. The incentives are totally out of whack.

The other option is for X to just exercise a significant amount of subjective discretion to identify the actually notable and interesting accounts. Of course that’s what they did in the old days of Twitter and everyone seemed to hate it. But maybe they were on to something. Alternatively, again, they could end the whole program and that would be perfectly fine with me. That’s my preferred outcome by far.