We lost a Twitter (X) account because of replies

Before Twick, we ran the X account for another brand of ours. We grew it the way most small accounts grow on Twitter: by replying. A lot.

It cost us one account suspended for good, a second one limited for a week, and about 120 followers. It’s also the reason Twick exists.

How we used to reply

Every day we sent between 50 and 80 replies. We were busy, so all of them went out inside one or two hours.

The replies came from ChatGPT. For each post we copied the text into ChatGPT, asked for a reply, copied the answer back to X, and pressed Reply. When a post had a picture, we took a screenshot and pasted that in too. Fifty times a day.

The replies read like ChatGPT wrote them, because it did. “Great point!” “This is such a valuable perspective.” “Building in public isn’t just a strategy, it’s a mindset.” We fixed some of them. Most went out as they were.

We also had a habit we didn’t think twice about. We’d open one person’s profile and reply to every post they had made that day, one after another, then move on to the next person.

Looking back, we had stacked up everything X’s rules warn about: bulk replies in a short window, piles of replies to the same people, and the same kind of reply under every post.

The first account: limited, then suspended

The first account didn’t have X Premium. One day X labeled it: the account was limited.

We looked for a way to ask X to take another look and found none. There was no review button on that account. So we did what felt sensible at the time: we stopped worrying and waited for the limit to wear off.

It didn’t. A few weeks later the label was still there, and then the account was suspended. We appealed. Then we appealed again, and again. Every appeal was turned down.

Everything we had built on that account was gone: the followers, the conversations, the people who knew us from the replies.

The second account: limited again, with no warning

Our second account had X Premium and the blue check. In about two months it grew past 2,700 followers. We were still replying the same way.

Then it happened again, and this time X didn’t tell us.

We kept replying, and nothing looked wrong. The next day our replies were getting far fewer views. When we went looking, every reply was still on our own profile’s Replies tab, so nothing had been deleted. But when we opened the posts we had replied to, our replies weren’t there. We checked behind “Show probable spam” too, and found nothing. The replies were missing from the threads.

We knew what that meant from the first account: we had been limited. X had sent no notice, and without a notice there was no button to ask for a review.

So we waited. We didn’t touch the account for about a week. Then we posted a single reply, and the notice finally showed up:

This time there was a Request Review button, which we had never seen on the account without Premium. We pressed it. About 20 minutes later:

What the week cost

The review took 20 minutes. Finding out we were limited, and waiting for X to even let us ask, took a week, and that week was the worst of it.

On X, people forget you fast once you stop showing up under their posts. For that week we couldn’t reply to anyone in a way they would see: our replies didn’t show in the threads, and nobody got a notification from us. We lost close to 120 followers.

Why we built Twick

We didn’t want to stop replying. Replies were how we met people and how the account grew. We wanted to reply without the parts that kept getting us in trouble, so we built the tool we wished we’d had:

• Replies about the post, in our own voice. Twick drafts replies about the post in front of you, in the way you talk, with 100% no AI slop. No more “Great point!”
• No copying and pasting. Twick sits right under the post on X. Press the sparkle, pick a draft, and it goes into the reply box.
• It reads the picture. No screenshots. Twick looks at the images in a post before it writes.
• You post it yourself. Twick never posts, likes or follows for you. Every reply is one you chose.
• Reminders to slow down. Safe mode reminds you when you pass 30 replies in an hour, 100 in a day, 5 to the same person in a day, or two replies only seconds apart. Those are the habits that got us limited.

Twick can’t promise X will never limit your account. Nobody can. It can help you avoid the habits that cost us ours.

If you think your account has been limited, X account locked, limited or suspended explains each state and what X says to do. If your replies are ending up at the bottom of threads, start with Show probable spam. And if you’d like to see how Twick works on X, here’s the Twitter reply generator.