Why Tech Twitter Lost Its Soul

Tech Twitter didn’t collapse because people stopped building. It collapsed the moment people started caring more about views than understanding. The moment monetization entered the picture, timelines quietly shifted from curiosity to performance. Posts stopped being questions or explorations and started becoming products. Every thought had to be optimized, every mistake hidden, every idea stretched into a thread even when it deserved two honest sentences.

Over time, Tech X started feeling less like a place where developers think out loud and more like LinkedIn wearing a black hoodie. The same recycled opinions kept looping. “Frontend is dead.” “AI will replace engineers.” “Just learn this stack and you’ll be rich.” The problem isn’t that these topics exist. The problem is that they’re posted without depth, without context, and without the person posting them actually grappling with the reality behind the words.

What disappeared was the messy middle. The part where you don’t know yet. The part where things break and you don’t immediately understand why. That kind of post doesn’t farm likes, so it slowly vanished.

I realized this when I stopped caring about analytics altogether. The last time I checked my analytics was over a month ago. Not as a statement, not as some monk-mode flex, but because it genuinely stopped mattering. Once you detach from numbers, something interesting happens: you start posting for yourself again. You write because you’re thinking, not because you’re performing.

Right now, I’m learning C and trying to build small applications with it. Nothing flashy. No UI screenshots. No “launched in public” nonsense. Just code that forces me to think. And C doesn’t let you pretend. You don’t get to fake understanding. The moment you write something slightly wrong, memory reminds you who’s in charge. Segmentation faults, weird behavior, programs that compile perfectly and still make no sense at runtime. At some point, I had so many memory issues that it became obvious I wasn’t stuck in C. I was stuck in my understanding of how the system works.

So I stopped pushing forward and went backward instead. I started revisiting operating systems. Memory models. How processes actually run. How the OS decides what your program can and cannot do. I dipped back into computer networks too, because the moment your program touches anything outside itself, ignorance shows up instantly. You can’t debug what you don’t conceptually understand.

While doing this, another realization hit hard. I finally understood why real developers, not vibe-coders, tend to dislike Windows. Not because hating Windows is trendy, but because when you’re working close to the system, Windows constantly puts walls in front of you. Too many restrictions, too many hidden layers, too much fighting the environment instead of learning from it. You’re boxed into tools and abstractions whether you want them or not.

That curiosity pushed me into Linux. I started exploring it in a virtual machine, played around with Arch, and for the first time felt what real control over a system actually means. You don’t just use the OS. You understand it. You break it. You fix it. Unfortunately, my laptop can’t comfortably handle running two operating systems at once, so I had to make a choice. Comfort or learning. Games or growth. So yeah, Valorant goes away, and Arch comes in by the end of the year. That’s not discipline. That’s just deciding what matters more.

This kind of learning doesn’t look good on a timeline. There’s nothing viral about staring at a memory bug for hours. There’s nothing sexy about reading OS internals and realizing how shallow your previous understanding was. And that’s exactly why it’s valuable.

Learning from scratch is nearly impossible. That’s the point. It forces humility. It forces patience. It forces real thinking. And Tech Twitter used to be full of that energy. People sharing half-baked ideas, lessons from broken systems, things they were still figuring out. Not teaching. Learning in public.

If Tech X feels dead today, it’s because too many people are pretending to have arrived. Everyone’s an expert. Everyone’s selling something. Everyone’s afraid to look confused. And confusion is where real engineering starts.

If we want Tech X back, we don’t need better algorithms or new monetization models. We need people to stop performing and start being honest again. Post about what you’re learning. Post about what broke. Post about what you don’t understand yet. Even if it gets ignored. Especially if it gets ignored.

That’s how real builders talk. And that’s the version of Tech X worth saving.