Matt Izzo ⚡️

Monetization was a mistake. It's sad to see twitter turn into a circus. Everyone's just making noise for cash. The twitter I knew was meant for great discourse. You had community. There were days where we were ALL on the same wavelength. You'd scroll your timeline and read banger after banger. You actually learned stuff in the replies instead of seeing AI bot spam. Everyone did it for the love of the game. IF you wanted to monetize you had to do it in a really smart way. You couldn't just post thirst traps and get rewarded for it. What I miss the most is the community. The only reason places like "Money Twitter" and "Health Twitter" existed was because you actually saw stuff from people you followed. You didn't have to create intentional lists. Now if you like something you see 10 quote tweets in a row of the same thing. You have no idea just how insightful this app was a few years ago. Twitter changed my life.

You'll never understand just how great 2019-2021 twitter was. It might seem like I'm exaggerating but it truly felt like a digital town square where we all had shared consciousness. There was nothing on my feed but banger after banger. Zero fight videos. You didn't need to relentlessly curate your algorithm. It was all just... there. You had Lobo posting about becoming one with your body and mind. You had Lawrence bashing the UK (before it was cool). LogFitz posting three drinks. Sol leading the charge. Shaw cooking up literal bangers. Pre-fame Tate. Du dropping 180 character gems that would occasionally break normisphere. Tiger documenting it all. Built Different. The timeline was just out of this word. I learned so much. You could spend hours on twitter search (that's now broken). Grimhood. CK Eternity. They ran health twitter before health twitter existed. Every little thing that's popular now was discussed. We called seed oils vegetable oil and nobody talked about it. Deep Nutrition was the only mainstream book (if you could call it mainstream) that openly called it out. A text based platform like twitter should never have been monetized. The natural consequence is that ideas are no longer prioritized. Communities get broken down... it must be impossible to grow an account from scratch now without resorting to posting slop, doing attention grabbing antics or producing cinematic grade advertorials. It's sad to see. You just had to be there. Twitter changed my life.