I know I’ve got my moments of wanting to rage quit Twitter/X. Many times, in fact.
But I think I never could bring myself to do it all this while, because despite all the negatives, the positives really shine when they do. On balance, I’d say it’s a net positive for me.
Because without Twitter, I would have never discovered:
Indie hacking as a lifestyle alternative over startups
Digital nomads, and how they use low cost locations as arbitrage
Small bets for resilience and diversity, over a leap of faith
Found freelance remote work to feed my family
AI, Cursor, Claude, ChatGPT
Made my career transition to frontend dev
Building in public
Learn about marketing, SEO
That a solopreneur path to more than $10k/month is possible
Vibe coding
Game dev
Health hacks
Sleep hacks
And many more things earlier on that I had forgotten
It gave me words and resonance to describe things that I was already doing.
It got me on these world-changing trends so early.
It made me more curious, more open, more hungry.
It’s so bleeding edge sometimes it hurts, but in a good way.
It made me money, friends, and exposure to lots and lots of cool ideas.
It made me imagine new possibilities, new futures.
It changed me. For the better.
The worse bits, I can manage and mitigate.
But net net, it was a positive.
Thank you, Twitter.
We can like the good parts of Twitter without condoning the bad. I'm with you in getting much out of the platform.
Though some days I want to delete the app and never come back, too. Haha.
I hope that maybe Substack can attract more of the thoughtful, adventurous types here and leave some of the politics behind. Then I can fully switch over.