I've recently begun my foray into tech Twitter, and the more I read, the more my head hurts. The platform seems inundated with noise, and every fucker with a blue check seems to be mad at some other fucker with a blue check that spoke on some subtopic that's tangentially related to them. I kind of hate it, but at the same time it's quite fun to sit on the sidelines and poke the bear once in a while.
A good example of this phenomenon is the recent Lex Fridman interview with Pieter Levels. For context, Pieter Levels is a digital nomad entrepeneur type guy, whose philosophy mainly seems to revolve around building fairly generic B2C products as often and fast as possible. A non-comprehensive list of these products are available in his Twitter bio, where they're accompanied with what seems to be fairly unhumble MRR figures. A Twitter thread talking about the interview (often originating from a retweet of a clip from the interview) might go something like this:
Or alternatively:
People just seem incredibly pissed off about anything and everything, from editors to designing basic app architecture. It's fun to spectate, but the constant noise can get a bit taxing. Whilst scrolling my timeline, it's not uncommon to see a post making some controversial / bold claim - either as rage bait or the author just having a spontaneous soapbox moment - being followed by an equally outrageous retweet a couple swipes or so later, decrying the original tweet and framing the author as a blasphemer that ought to be cast into the pits of hell. And it begs the question - what is the point of all of this?
A common rhetoric adopted by people in this subgroup is the idea of 'building' at all costs. Yet, if you truly embraced the rhetoric you spent so much time tweeting about, surely you'd spend more of your time 'building', and less time yapping about it, or telling other people how they should / shouldn't be doing things, no? It's tempting to label it as a grift - but odds are they aren't making much off of this, or at least not as much as they would putting their time into doing something else more productive instead.
One can only conclude that they're doing it for sheer love of the game, but in my personal and humble opinion, it's a game without much reward. Unless you somehow get pre-seed funding for your GPT wrapper because a VC saw your tweet about how Vercel is a scam and everyone using it must be shot. I'm also of the opinion that there's an inverse relationship between time spent yapping about 'building' and the success of so-called 'building', but I have no actual data to back this up. All in all, I think I'll continue treating my timeline like a petri dish for observation, or perhaps more like a pack of chicken breasts in the back of the fridge that only gets thrown out when the smell becomes too unbearable. 🂑