New Delhi, July 14 -- NEW YORK - The reply section on X has been one of the internet's more reliably hostile places for most of the platform's two-decade history. Nikita Bier, X's head of product, acknowledged as much on Sunday when he announced a change to the platform's recommendation algorithm designed to fix exactly that. The adjustment, now live across the platform, reweights replies to surface posts from mutual followers - people who follow each other bidirectionally - ahead of contributions from strangers. The effect, Bier says, is a reply section that feels less like confronting a crowd of people you have never met and more like a conversation with people who actually know you.

Bier is admitting that for an unspecified period, X'...