How Elon Musk's monetisation turned Kenyans on X into engagement farmers

For decades, the digital collective known as Kenyans on X (KOT) was famous for its fierce, unyielding internet warfare. They were a virtual army capable of moving geopolitical needles, humbling global corporations, and defending the national honour with blistering wit.

But over the past couple of years, the tone of the Kenyan timeline has fundamentally shifted. The sharp, organic humour that once defined KOT has largely been replaced by a highly coordinated, relentless pursuit of a different kind of clout: hard U.S. currency.

Ever since Elon Musk rolled out X's Creator Ads Revenue Sharing programme, a hyperactive economy of 'impression farmers' and digital hustlers has exploded across Nairobi. 

What began as an innocuous social media playground has transformed into a high-stakes digital gold rush.

To understand the shift, one only needs to look at how the timeline operates today. 

The initial requirements seemed simple enough for an internet-fluent nation facing tough economic times: secure an X Premium subscription, cross the 500-follower mark, and generate at least 5 million impressions within a rolling three-month window.

To get paid, a creator needs millions of impressions from verified (blue tick) users. 

Before the recent cuts, the payout rate was roughly $8.50 (Ksh 1,000) per 1 million verified impressions. And so, for these creators, the fastest way to get a verified X user to reply is simply by being provocative.

In a country dealing with a high youth unemployment rate and a depreciating local currency, the promise of dollar-denominated payouts was irresistible. 

Almost overnight, a new breed of content strategies emerged – and everyone was on board, including the village dunderhead with zero charisma and negligible talent. 

The initial months of the programme saw euphoric screenshots of Stripe payouts shared across Kenyan tech spaces. 

Accounts boasting of earning hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars for a few weeks of posting drove a massive surge in Premium sign-ups, with everyone maddened by the dollars, rushing to cash in and claim a stake in this suddenly flourishing bazaar.

To secure the bag, all strategies were employed - the crude, the creative, the astonishing and even the annoyingly vague.

All of a sudden, X turned into an engagement bait, as Kenyans deployed an arsenal of simple, repetitive questions designed entirely to milk replies. 

Posts like "Can a man and a woman just be friends?" or "What is a financial mistake you regret?" now flood the feed, with the poster hoping to draw curious characters who spend hours scrolling through the comment section, killing time, replying to the comments they agree or disagree with and basically building a formidable muscle under the initial post.

Ding! It works! Engagement farming at its finest! 

The allure of the dollar saw more aggressive tactics being deployed. As it all happened, others unfurled missiles of outrageous material by simply aggregating viral videos, shocking news snippets, hilarious bloopers, or highly controversial opinions to provoke emotional, high-velocity argument chains.

By posting intentionally controversial takes on marriage, tribalism, politics or trending news, these creators trigger a flood of angry replies. The goal is simply to trigger reactions. Every angry reply, every quote tweet, and every argument adds to impression counts. And more impressions mean more money.

It was all a well-orchestrated maneuver meant to spike the engagement, explode the tweet, reach millions and unlock the highly-seductive Elon Musk dollar crumbs.

The smarter chaps, hoping to beat everyone at this make-or-break harvest field, brought on board the sneaky reply spam, with networks of verified accounts systematically commenting on each other's posts within minutes of publishing to fool the algorithm's velocity metrics.

Enter vagueposting. A frustratingly annoying habit of posting with the sole purpose of ragebaiting everyone, which also involves being intentionally cryptic as a form of engagement bait.

All of a sudden, the Kenyan X timeline was plagued by incomplete posts alluding to a mysterious subject, with the timeline littered with posts that hint at upcoming or ongoing drama, secret knowledge or unspoken opinions, with the original poster rarely explaining the point. 

The more the angry replies, the more the reactions, the more the curiosity, the more people literally begged to understand the context, the fatter the bank. 

Posting on X, Nigerian X personality Yemi Adejuyigbe wrote: "Vagueposting is a trend because the algorithm senses that you are clicking on those tweets (engagement) to see the replies for context so it promotes vague tweets over ones that explain enough that you can read and scroll past them."

No context. No names. No follow-up - X's favorite passive-aggressive art form. 

"Ever since they brought monetisation into X … the more engagement you get on a tweet, the more views it gets, the more money you money you can make from tweets,” journalist Benedict Townsend explained on Scroll Deep, the TikTok account where he covers viral internet trends.

"If you bait people into replying to your tweet by being as vague as possible, you can make more money,” he explained.

Purely packaged to drive up engagement, vagueposting is the perfect algorithm hack, a psychological puzzle, and a cry for connection all wrapped into one messy, beautifully cryptic package.

Earlier this year, some slick Kenyans on X even started hawking monetisation courses. 

These guides, legitimate or not, supposedly instructed people on how to manipulate the algorithm through coordinated engagement, in which groups of creators agreed to reply to each other’s posts to inflate numbers. 

They also encouraged low-effort spam by posting over 100 stolen videos or copy-paste news updates daily, or by using urgent labels on every single post to trick users into clicking.

Back in April, the Elon Musk-led social media platform started revamping its revenue sharing programme by deranking low-quality content and incentivising ‘original, high-quality content that brings new value to the Timeline'.

The new update was announced by X Product Head Nikita Bier, who in a post on X (formerly Twitter) wrote, “For this creator payout cycle, we’re experimenting with new tools to identify original authors of content and allocating a portion of revenue to them.”

"Reposts & commentary will always be a core pillar of X, but our Revenue Sharing programme should incentivise original, high-quality content that brings new value to the Timeline. This means rewarding the effort it takes to produce something, not just the poster who helped it travel furthest,” Bier added.