X boosts mutuals: trust is the last signal AI cant fake

X rolled out a tweak that boosts posts from your mutuals, the people you follow who follow you back. Nikita Bier said the mutual-follow data was straight up missing from the algo, which is why reply sections filled up with people you dont recognize.
Everyone seems to be reading this as a small quality of life fix. I think it's a signal of something bigger.

For about 20 years the trade was simple. Broadcast to strangers, get reach. That worked because producing decent content had a real cost, so volume was a rough proxy for effort. AI killed the cost. Now the feed is full of stuff that reads well and means nothing, and there is no cheap way to tell what is worth your time.
When the content signal goes to zero, the only thing left to rank on is the graph. Who you follow, and who vouched for who.

If that's right, this is the first of many. Feeds start re-weighting toward people you already have some trust in, and the pure reach era begins to close.

Source, in case you missed it:
https://x.com/nikitabier/status/2076747704248758617

Curious whether people here see it differently. Is this just X patching replies, or the start of feeds swinging back to the follow graph?

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