(Credit: Shutterstock/ Worawee Meepian)
X has promised to make it easier to see replies you actually want to read by letting you filter out responses from those with blue checkmarks.
"Rolling out now: sort replies on any post by most relevant, recent, or liked," X tweeted.
One of the benefits of X Premium is "reply prioritization," meaning your replies on posts are "prioritized over those of non-subscribers." But that has led to complaints about spammy replies from Premium members (often derisively referred to as "blue checks" since membership also includes a "verified" checkmark) outranking more useful replies from non-paying X users.
"Have you considered how much spam, unrelated ads, OnlyFans nude ads, unfunny people, people whose language I don't speak, crypto scams, and verified parody accounts I need to scroll past in order to reach the part where comments are actually sorted by relevance and impressions?" one X user complained on Reddit about eight months ago.
"Probably the biggest contributor to the degradation in usefulness of the platform. Used to have very high value responses, sometimes from experts in fields and now it's all trolling, spam and noise," another Redditor responded.
"Previously if you saw a viral tweet chances were great that if you'd click on it you would find really funny/entertaining comments and reply threads. This is now completely gone (and also the reason why - as of now - Reddit is my favourite Twitter alternative)," someone else wrote.
X apparently heard those complaints. The sorting option is now live on the web and mobile. "Most relevant replies" appears to be the default, but you can tap the downward-facing arrow to see "Most recent replies" or "Most liked replies." It didn't explain what makes a tweet "relevant," though most of those tweets are still coming from verified users.
In June, there were reports that X is working on a way to block links in replies. According to app researcher Nima Owji, the feature would allow users to check a box if they don’t want people to be able to include a link in replies to a particular post, though this hasn't rolled out yet.