Twitter is now attention roulette and ultimately meaningless

I no longer feel any pull towards Twitter.

I can't really recall the last time anything good came out of it for me personally. Neither ideas nor connections.

The changes to the algorithm turned the platform into a form of attention roulette.

As a result, hardly anyone is investing serious time into creating content for it.

The content is now either clickbait, low-effort shitposts, or regurgitated nonsense.

When there was a clear relationship between follower count + effort and the attention you got, it made sense to invest time to create quality original content.

But most people by now seem worn out by the fact that no matter how many followers you have and how much effort you put in, most posts get a few hundred views max.

One of the main ways I was using Twitter is to find people doing interesting things and then follow them to see what they're up to. This no longer works since you no longer see tweets from the people you follow unless they go viral. And manually checking profiles is just too cumbersome.

When a post goes viral, the attention you get feels shallow.

I still occasionally put a tweet or two into Typefully. After using Twitter for a few years, my brain is wired to notice when thoughts would make a good tweet. So I put them in the queue to get them out of my system.

When I logged into Twitter for the first time in a while yesterday to read a thread I had saved, I noticed that one of my scheduled tweets had gone viral.

I thought it's quite telling that I hadn't noticed this in any way otherwise.

There was no spike in traffic to my site, no more newsletter subscribers than usual, no DMs, no emails, no new clients.

Attention on Twitter no longer has any ripple effects beyond the platform.

By Twitter's own measures, when you now win, you win a lot bigger.

Most content gets zero attention and the few winners get a huge amount of views.

But it's entirely meaningless.

At most, you get a few new followers. But followers no longer mean anything either.

No matter how many followers you have, each new tweet is only shown to a tiny sample group of people no matter what. And based on this sample group's reactions, the tweet is buried or goes ultra-viral. I have 20k+ followers and an average post gets maybe 500 views.

I did feel a bit disgusted by the content I saw when I logged back in.

There was a clip from the Joe Rogan podcast. There were reaction-bait questions. There were irrelevant ads. Indie hackers complaining. Outrage bait. A few shitposts. Regurgitated advice from people who never accomplished anything. Random posts from Elon Musk.

I had to log out again after two minutes.

It was the same feeling when I stopped eating junk food and eventually even the thought of eating it again makes me feel sick.

It's sad but the good old times will never come back.

Twitter is now a siloed attention roulette machine just like TikTok. That was the plan when Elon took over and they succeeded. There's no going back.

It will take some time before a proper alternative emerges. It probably won't look anything like Twitter.

My preferred solution would be if we could just go back to personal blogs, blogrolls, newsletters, and RSS feeds. It seems unlikely but maybe a new generation of wrappers around these decentralized protocols would work.

I've personally gone back to reading books and blog posts, talking to people via email, working on a book project, and prioritizing in-person, local relationships.

I also built a personal search engine that indexes all posts from my favorite blogs. Whenever I'm looking for some inspiration, I type in my question or a few related keywords and it shows me all relevant posts from my favorite thinkers.

Thanks to some AI magic on the backend, it's surprisingly smart at surfacing relevant posts.

I doubt this would be useful for anyone but me in its current form. But at least for now, this feels like a solid solution to surface great content, a job Twitter used to do for me until they decided to hide all posts with external links in them.

I'll keep tinkering with solutions at the intersection of decentralized protocols and AI to surface great content.

The enshittification of the previous generation of online platforms like Google and Twitter is close to the tipping point.

This is exciting. A mass exodus will happen, and fast.

It feels like we're finally on the verge of something new.