Some writers and thinkers have no thought of financial gain. The power of their convictions, or their curiosity, ensures that to write, and to be read, is its own reward.

Not me! Yes, I love to write, and I love to be read, but I also love money. What can I say? Bills don’t pay themselves and beer doesn’t come for free.

There’s one chance for money that I haven’t taken, though. I can’t bring myself to monetise my Twitter account. That’s not because I wouldn’t take money from Elon Musk (Elon, get in touch). It’s because I think that it would ruin my posts. Now, I shoot off silly jokes and some people seem to like them. If money was at stake, though, I fear I would become more earnest. More calculated. More disingenuous. 

I’d find myself poring over my engagement metrics to understand what sort of tweets might go viral. Am I being sarcastic? Am I being sarcastic enough? In time — though I shudder to say it — the portrait in my attic might begin to resemble Ian Miles Cheong.

The sad fact is that being able to monetise one’s posting has made Twitter worse. The app has always had its grifters and attention seekers. Now it has more grifters and attention seekers than London has Turkish barbers and vape shops. Everywhere, one sees them peddling their low-grade products — diminishing the atmosphere of the neighbourhood.

There are the outrage-mongers — not just people with provocative opinions but people who wear blatant stupidity like a badge of honour. No, they don’t actually think that Sydney Sweeney is “mid”. They just want to aggravate you into engaging with them. Well-meaning attempts to defend reality, valiant as they are, only add to their profits.

Then there are the list-peddlers — the charlatans who turn reality, in all its multi-dimensional interestingness, into nuggets of information that don’t touch the sides of your consciousness. Here are five reasons I hate them (and the third won’t shock you): they are lazy, they are parasitic, they are soulless, they reduce the rich ingredients of the emotions and the intellect to informational junk food, and they are symptomatic of the point that the risk of technological progress is not just that machines will replace men but that men will become machines. Deport them all back to LinkedIn.

Of course, there are the fake news merchants — equally parasitic online swindlers who broadcast dubious claims about current events as if they have researched and verified them and not just swiped them from the algorithm. At best they are opportunistic. At worst they are liars.

Finally, there are the gurus — advising us on how to live our lives.

Sometimes, their advice is clichéd.

Sometimes, it is damaging. 

For some reason, their paragraphs are always a sentence long.

They are insufferable.

Of course, it is great when people are rewarded for their creativity. I’m sure there are people who have deserved to make money from Twitter. Good luck to them. But the incentives here are terrible. They are actively making us less creative. We are incentivised to put quantity over quality. We are incentivised to seek the sensational rather than the subtle. We are incentivised to lower our epistemic standards. This only makes us more miserably accustomed to producing and consuming informational slop.

At the same time, Twitter — or “X”, if you like — has depressed the visibility of links. Elon Musk has been vocal about his desire for it to be the “everything app”. Naturally, then, he does not want people to leave. Articles should be on Twitter, essays should be on Twitter, videos should be on Twitter et cetera. Well, there are worse places to put them. But creatively and economically there are also better places to upload and enjoy them. 

Twitter has always been like the pub. You go to the office, and the shop, and the cinema, and then you go to the pub to talk about what has been happening. You don’t want your pub to expand to encompass offices, and shops, and cinemas. It would get claustrophobic.

So, while Mr Musk has been disincentivising creativity and rigour on his platform, he is disincentivising creativity and rigour elsewhere. 

I don’t want to be too negative. Musk’s liberal attitude towards what can be posted on his platform has been a boon for us. We should be grateful. But he has somehow succeeded in diminishing the overall quality of posts — cheapening the experience and threatening the “vibe shift” against managerial progressivism with a tidal wave of cringe.

Money may or may not buy you happiness. But it can’t buy you better posts.