X Is Rewarding Thinkers

If you’ve been on X at all this past week, then you may have seen this post or some variation posted by some other account of it:

This was published four days before the $1M article competition was announced.

Which means it wasn’t written to win anything.

It was written because the author had something to say.

That distinction matters more than most people realize.

Every time the X algo has made changes this past year, I’ve seen winners fall into two groups:

1. Those who chase incentives.

2. And those who were already aligned with where the platform was going.

The second group always looks “lucky” in hindsight.

But they’ve mastered pattern recognition.

We’ve seen this play out over and over again.

When blogging took off in the early 2000s, the people who built lasting audiences weren’t optimizing for traffic hacks. They were publishing ideas that held up over time. Essays that were

an extension of their thinking.

When email matured, the inbox eventually rejected noise. The newsletters that survived weren’t the most frequent. They were the most thoughtful.

Social platforms have always followed the same arc.

For years, the internet optimized for speed. It valued shorter, faster, more stimulating.

Content was designed to be consumed and forgotten.

That phase always ends.

What’s happening on X right now isn’t a sudden change because of a prize pool. The prize is just an indicator of a public acknowledgment that was already underway.

The platform is rewarding depth through long-form content because it creates user behaviors the algorithm wants.

→ Time spent reading.

→ Replies that turn into conversations.

→ Saves.

→ Shares.

→ Follows.

These actions aren’t as likely with a 280 character tweet.

They come from substance. That’s why the posts getting the highest reach right now don’t feel engineered. They feel authored. They have a point of view. A beginning, middle, and end. They make the reader slow down.

And slowing someone down is the hardest thing to do on the internet.

And it all goes back to the personal brand patterns I’ve seen the best personal brands use dozens of times before:

- They think clearly in public.

- They don’t wait for incentives to tell them what’s valuable.

- They don’t contort themselves to match formats.

- They don’t dilute their ideas to maximize reach.

- They write what they would stand behind even if nobody rewarded it.

Ironically, that’s exactly what gets rewarded.

Authority works this way. It isn’t created by virality, even though that’s what social media has been trying to shove down our way of being. It’s revealed by consistency of thought.

And once you have it, attention becomes optional. You can channel it into whatever you want.

⚡ Action Step:

Before you write your next post, ask yourself:

“If there were no algorithm, no prizes, and no likes…would I still want my name tied to [this]?”

If the answer is yes, you’re on the right track.

If not, you’re just renting attention.

– Wiz

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