The drops

Four things move under this book. X's engineers push changes to the public feed code: a weight goes from 15 to 12, a filter is added, a rule is reordered. X rewrites its help pages and the Original Content Rewards Program terms. Around the 9th of each month X issues the Under the Hood report, which shows what its enforcement systems did to real accounts. And the fourth is ours alone: our own software, connected to the X API, publishes posts on live accounts and reads back what happened to every one of them: the impressions, the replies, the follows, the hour it went out, and more. Reading the code tells you what X says it rewards. The measurements tell you what it actually did. Nobody who only reads the code has that second half. On the 25th of every month the book is read against all four again, and the new version drops.