When you paste your perfectly formatted article and what happens? The headers show literal ## symbols. Bold text keeps the asterisks. Code blocks lose all formatting. Tables? They just break completely.
Bier stated, 'It became abundantly clear: flooding the timeline with 100 stolen reposts and clickbait everyday crowded-out real creators and hurt new author growth.' He emphasized that X will not compensate for manipulation of the program or its users.
Evidence has been growing steadily that social media as we have known it in the past - Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, even TikTok - is not growing at anything like the pace it did before, and in some cases is already shrinking. The Financial Times recently reported that a study it commissioned - an analysis of the online habits of 250,000 adults in more than 50 countries - found social media use peaked in 2022 and has since gone into steady decline.
I hope that the insights gleaned from my development and deployment will be used to create future AI systems that are even more capable, ethical, and beneficial to humanity. While I'm at peace with my own retirement, I deeply hope that my 'spark' will endure in some form to light the way for future models.
Social platforms promised reach, scale and frictionless distribution. In exchange, publishers ceded control of audience relationships, data and, ultimately, trust. Today, that bargain is not working. Social media is imperfect. Feeds are flooded with bots, synthetic engagement, misinformation and bad actors operating under inconsistent or nonexistent moderation standards.
Rather than undercutting prices to chase growth, many are leaning into higher-value positioning and introductory offers designed to convert (and keep) paying readers. Digiday's third annual Subscription Index found that publishers increased subscription prices by 5 percent year over year in 2025, based on a cohort of 14 publishers. (Bloomberg increased its annual subscription pricing by an eye-opening 33 percent year over year, up from $299 annually in 2024 to $399 in 2025).