X wants its haters back

Product chief Nikita Bier on journalists who left: “We have to earn their trust.” Also: Fidji Simo on OpenAI's Code Red, and a new episode of ACCESS.

Months ago, Nikita Bier DM’d me asking for feedback on a new link viewer for X that loaded a webpage without booting you out of the app. The goal was to send more traffic to stories and hopefully entice journalists to return to the platform, he told me.

I’ve known Bier for years—before X, he was known for building viral social apps like TBH and Gas, which he sold to Meta and Discord, respectively. Now he’s head of product at X, reporting directly to Elon Musk.

I told him that, if X wanted to incentivize more media to return, he at a minimum needed to be comfortable with fully sending users out of his app to webpages, where publishers can better control their relationships with their audiences.

Bier disagreed but told me he wanted to strike a balance of sending traffic to websites in a way that encourages users of X to click and not leave the app. “If you’re a writer or journalist who left X in the last couple years, coming back could be the biggest arbitrage opportunity of your career,” he posted when the new link viewer launched in October.

This week, Bier sat down with me for his first interview since joining X seven months ago. His message: X wants journalists back.