Why I’m Done Trying to Make X Make Sense

I think X has finally beaten me.

Not in the dramatic “I’m quitting social media” way. I’m not rage-quitting. I’m still there. I still read it. I still post occasionally. But whatever part of me believed that thoughtful posts had a chance of reliably finding thoughtful people on that platform is gone now.

Every time I post something I’ve actually spent time thinking about, it dies quietly. No conversation. No disagreement. Nothing. Then I scroll for thirty seconds and see the same hollow, overconfident take recycled five different ways, all doing numbers. Same structure. Same tone. Same certainty. Different avatar.

For a while I assumed I was just bad at playing the game. Maybe I needed better hooks. Better timing. More frequent posting. But the longer I paid attention, the more obvious it became that the game itself had changed. X isn’t trying to surface people who think clearly or have experience anymore. It’s optimized for people who sound confident, post constantly, and never slow down long enough to question themselves.

Once you see that, the rest of the timeline makes an uncomfortable amount of sense.

What we call engagement now is mostly pattern replication. Someone finds a post that worked, strips it down to its shape, swaps in new nouns, maybe runs it through AI, and ships it again. No original thinking required. No understanding necessary. Just vibes and velocity. The platform rewards this behavior relentlessly, so of course it spreads.

AI has poured gasoline on it. What used to require at least a little effort now takes seconds. We have people generating opinions they don’t hold, advice they’ve never followed, and lessons they didn’t earn, all wrapped in a tone of absolute certainty. These aren’t bad ideas poorly expressed; they’re empty ideas expressed confidently. The goal isn’t to understand anything or test it against reality; it’s to hit a familiar shape the algorithm recognizes and move on. Being wrong carries no cost because nothing here is meant to last, and accountability disappears the moment the next cloned take ships.

If you’ve spent years building real things, systems that break, teams that struggle, products that fail before they work, this environment feels especially off. Real work teaches you that most problems are contextual, that certainty usually comes after mistakes, and that strong opinions should survive contact with time. Those instincts are liabilities on X now. They slow you down. They make you less loud. So people who care more about being right than being visible either go quiet or leave.

That’s why publishing feels important again in a way it hasn’t for a long time. Not content. Not growth. Publishing. Writing something that doesn’t disappear in a few hours, that forces you to finish the thought and stand behind it. A blog doesn’t care how often you post or how confident you sound. It doesn’t reward exaggeration or punish hesitation. It just sits there and waits to see whether what you said holds up.

Your mistakes stay visible. Your thinking leaves a paper trail. That’s uncomfortable, but that’s exactly the point.

If your goal is attention, publishing feels slow and inefficient. If your goal is leverage, clarity, and trust over time, it’s one of the few things that actually compounds. I’m not interested in competing with AI-generated certainty or optimizing for impressions anymore. I want a body of work I can live with, something I can point to instead of arguing in replies, something that still makes sense when I read it a year from now.

I’ll still use X, but it’s no longer the destination. It’s a hallway. A place to drop a link once the thinking is done somewhere else. The real work happens in quieter places now, places that don’t reward velocity over judgment or confidence over competence.

If that means fewer people see it, that’s fine. I’m not trying to reach everyone. I’m trying to reach the people who still care whether something is actually true.