Some interface changes and nudges, like the illuminated buttons prompting you to subscribe to apps, are slightly annoying but easy to ignore. Others are so in your face you want to throw your phone in a river. X’s new initiative to encourage users to promote their posts clearly falls into this category.
Over the past 24 hours, a growing number of users have reported that a mysterious hand pointing to the “promote” button suddenly appeared while they were writing a post. This angered people across the board.
With Halloween approaching, this could be a prank intended to scare users, although X hasn’t said so. And even users who wanted to promote a post and spend money might be scared off after seeing the hand.
TBPN podcast president Dylan Abruscato said this engagement tip was “the most Nikita-coded thing I’ve ever seen,” a nod to the growth tactics associated with Nikita Bier, X’s former chief product officer.
Bier left the platform in August after almost a year at the helm. On Monday, former Bier boss and former product manager for Snap and Discord, Peter Sellis, announced that he had taken over as product director at X.
It is unclear whether the hand is the work of Sellis. We’ve contacted X for comment and will update our story if we receive a response.
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