What Elon Gets Right About User Behavior?

Elon Musk gets a lot of attention, but when you actually spend time on his platforms – especially X, the site formerly known as Twitter – you notice something different from all the headlines. Most experts try to dissect every policy or algorithm change, but what stands out more are the day-to-day patterns that form as millions of people post, reply, and argue in a place where the rules are lighter.

While other social media sites keep things heavily moderated or curate what you see, X is more open-ended, so you see what people actually choose to talk about or fight over. Sometimes that means the conversation turns messy or tense, but it’s also more honest about what draws people in.

It’s sort of like watching a real-time study in what people actually do when they’re not hemmed in by lots of restrictions: chasing after attention, jumping into debates, or latching onto whatever’s trending. Designers and researchers often spend years trying to work out what makes people stick around online, but X puts it all out there – no guesswork, just behavior happening in plain sight.

You see that people want things quickly, they want to be seen, and they want some sense of influence, even if it turns complicated topics into something blunt or rushed. There’s a whole ecosystem around this, from people sharing tips to those who buy packages for X as part of their own efforts to get noticed. If you’re interested in why people act the way they do online, or you’re trying to grow an audience like companies such as INSTABOOST, paying attention to these interactions can teach you a lot about what happens when there isn’t much between a person and the rest of the internet.

I’ve seen good campaigns fall apart for this reason. Teams often build their plans around how they hope people will act, not how they actually do. If you spend enough time on a platform like X, it becomes clear that people don’t behave in neat, predictable ways. The changes Elon Musk has made to X – around moderation, the algorithm, and so on – have made that more obvious. There’s a gap between what strategists expect and what really makes people comment, share, or argue. Most of the time, it’s things like curiosity, belonging, or just wanting to join whatever conversation is happening.

Watching brands and creators try to convert audience on X just shows how unpredictable all of it is. Without the polished filters you find on Instagram or LinkedIn, people’s habits are right there. If you’re working in digital or even just observing, it’s interesting to notice what shifts when people have more freedom and act on impulse. It seems like a lot of strategies miss because they assume people will be rational or loyal. But X shows it’s usually better to start by looking at what people really do, even if it’s messy, instead of building around what we’d like to be true. There’s something in just watching where things go when you stop trying to direct everything...

It’s not really about the tool – what matters is what people actually do with it. That part gets missed a lot when people try to figure out why users act the way they do on platforms like X. The features – threads, retweets, algorithm-driven timelines – set the stage, but most of the interesting stuff happens in how people move through it all.

Whatever Musk intended, X has basically become an experiment in how users make their own rules. It can feel rough, but you can watch groups take shape, see ideas move around, and notice how habits keep shifting. A new feature or policy doesn’t always flip everything; it’s more about the ways people find to work with or around the system. Some use hashtags to organize, some build long reply chains, and some look for ways to use odd corners of the platform or try things like Twitter engagement support when they want a push. It usually has less to do with what’s “supposed” to happen and more with what actually takes off – sometimes even the people building the platform are caught off guard.

If you pay attention, the most effective campaigns and communities seem to come from people treating each tool as both a limit and an opportunity to do something a bit different. At INSTABOOST, the teams that get the best results are usually the ones who notice these patterns, who watch what people are really trying to do, not just what the roadmap says should happen. That kind of understanding comes from just paying attention and seeing how things play out, even if it doesn’t all fit together neatly...

It’s easy to see how good the theory looks in planning sessions, but things never go that way once real people get involved. Product roadmaps and UX designs are usually built around the idea that users will behave in predictable, logical ways. But if you spend any time on X, it becomes clear how quickly those assumptions fall apart.

One of the main things Elon Musk demonstrates – intentionally or not – is that user behavior almost never fits into the neat frameworks people set up. When there’s a new trending topic, or when a group figures out how to use a feature differently, or even when people start working around the algorithm for their own reasons, that isn’t some odd glitch; it’s actually how things usually go. It’s the same story when you look into things like Twitter post visibility; what’s supposed to work rarely lines up exactly with what actually does.

And the more a platform tries to steer or predict how people will use it, the more users seem to find other ways to do things, sometimes in ways nobody expected. That’s probably why so many digital marketing “best practices” don’t work as well as promised – they’re based on idealized versions of users, not on what people are actually doing. The platforms that end up working the best aren’t necessarily the ones with the smartest plans, but the ones that pay close attention and make quick adjustments when things change.

So if you really want to get anywhere with engagement, or get useful results on social media, it’s more about looking at what’s actually happening day to day, instead of sticking to the plan. Musk’s habit of shaking things up isn’t always popular, but it’s a useful reminder that whatever framework you build, people will probably find their own way through it.