Some interface changes and nudges, like bright buttons urging you to subscribe in apps, are mildly annoying but easy to ignore. Others are so in your face that you want to throw your phone in a river. X’s new push to get users to promote their posts is firmly in that category.
Over the last 24 hours, a growing number of users have posted that a mysterious hand pointing to the “promote” button suddenly showed up while they were writing a post. This has irked people across the board.
With Halloween around the corner, it could be a prank meant to spook users, though 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’s president Dylan Abruscato said that this engagement trick was the “most Nikita-coded thing I’ve ever seen,” a nod to the growth tactics associated with Nikita Bier, X’s former head of product.
Bier left the platform in August after almost a year at the helm. On Monday, Bier’s former boss and ex-head of product for Snap and Discord, Peter Sellis, posted that he has taken over as X’s product chief.
It’s unclear if the hand is Sellis’s doing. We have reached out to X for a comment, and will update our story if we hear back.