"Crypto Twitter Is Over": When Chasing Traffic Becomes More Profitable Than Finding Opportunities, Smart People Are Collectively Exiting the Public Timeline
Author: washed
Translated by: TechFlow
TechFlow Summary: After navigating the tides of sneaker reselling, profit-seeking circles, and gambling Twitter, author washed discovered that the decline of niche arbitrage communities often follows a familiar script: once the core focus shifts from identifying early opportunities to climbing the social hierarchy and monetizing followers, the golden era has ended.
In this straightforward retrospective, the author juxtaposes Nike and Amazon's stock price cycles with the rise and fall of the sneaker community and course-selling craze, pointing out that Alpha discussions on crypto Twitter are mass-migrating to private groups and on-chain practices, with a structural decoupling occurring between public timelines and the actual fundamentals of the crypto industry.
I noticed a common turning point across various vertical niches on Twitter (such as sneaker Twitter, crypto Twitter, money Twitter, etc.): a community ends when attention shifts from the initial opportunity that brought everyone together to climbing the social ladder and monetizing followers.
Unfortunately, crypto Twitter (CT) is at this node right now.
A bit of personal background: my migration path across these circles went from sneaker Twitter → money Twitter → betting Twitter → crypto Twitter. In money Twitter and betting Twitter, I was mostly a lurker; but in sneaker Twitter and crypto Twitter, I participated deeply for years.
The commonalities between these vertical circles are far greater than people are willing to admit. Without a doubt, the crypto industry is the most ambitious track among them, which is why I chose to stay as a community member, though I'll save that for another time.
Their underlying operating laws are too similar. Watching everything crypto Twitter has gone through over the past year and a half gave me a strong sense of déjà vu. I will do my best to organize the thoughts formed after years of observing these communities from their rise to their decline.
Early Arbitrage Opportunities and Intensifying Competition
At first, a small group of anonymous players discovered something cool and decided to share their insights on Twitter. Pure curiosity fueled early growth, while algorithm recommendations or word-of-mouth from friends brought in a steady stream of new participants with enough luck.
The core value proposition of this small circle was to let early entrants exchange ideas and capitalize on market inefficiencies. Back then, no one cared about marketing or wanted to drag in the next batch of suckers.
Instead, the early stage often carried a "gatekeeping" mentality, deliberately protecting the treasure everyone had just discovered: the less competition, the more money this fortunate few who struck gold would make.
As time went on, the game evolved, and arbitrage patterns were gradually cracked down on. Tools and businesses specifically catering to participants began to emerge, newcomers flooded in faster, the market became increasingly efficient, and naturally, the gold left for ordinary people dwindled.
To some extent, this devolved into a "race to the bottom." Driven by greed, people engaged in increasingly extreme behavior to accelerate this deterioration, such as breaking unspoken unwritten rules (buying up over 3% of the token supply, leaking early Alpha leads prematurely, etc.).
Competitive advantage shifted from "being smarter than others" to "having faster hands than others." Everyone's ideas are the same, and everyone knows what to do; the only question is who can act first.
By the end of sneaker Twitter's heyday, we would even pay gray-market contacts to scan shipping labels in advance, so sneakers could be listed for pre-sale before they were even released.
Back then, official websites usually dropped shoes on Saturdays, with deliveries arriving by the following weekend. By the time we actually got the shoes in hand, prices had often plummeted significantly from the launch day peak, plunging everyone into a race to see "who can offload inventory ahead of everyone else."
We mainly used two methods: one was to snap up the highest buy orders directly on platforms like StockX, then go to the market to hunt down the sizes just sold; the other was to order online, secure a pair, and immediately resell it, completely ignoring whether the shoes hadn't arrived yet or when they'd even ship.
The hurdle was that StockX required sellers to ship goods within 2 to 3 business days. The solution? Pay someone with access to a UPS scanner to scan your printed prepaid shipping label in advance, marking the package as "shipped" in the system.
This way, your order wouldn't be canceled by the platform, allowing you to simply ship them out after receiving the shoes days later. When buyer demand for many sneakers plummeted to near zero, you essentially had to rely on some form of elaborate pre-sale just to squeeze out a marginal profit.
(Looking back now, this gray-area practice of scanning labels early walked a pretty thin line legally, but nobody cared during that shipping rush. I recall someone eventually getting caught and facing legal repercussions because of it, though I don't remember the specifics.)
The current meme coin and token launch games in crypto are basically in this phase. It's an endless race to "be the earliest dump seller": sniping new tokens, trading pre-launch internal pairs, distributing chips across multiple wallets—all are manifestations of tireless race-to-the-bottom involution.
Participant behavior will only become more radical. Unless something disruptive emerges, things will never improve on their own. Market opportunities haven't necessarily vanished completely, but the game is far less attractive to ordinary people than it used to be.
Pivot to Socializing and "Selling Dreams"
As participants slaughtered each other and completely ruined the original ecosystem, another wave shifted to a completely different game: social gaming. Since the original opportunity that initially attracted everyone is no longer tempting, selling the "get-rich-quick dream" to others actually became a more lucrative path.
Social influence was originally just a byproduct of making money in the market, but now it has become the opportunity itself. People no longer "make money to accumulate followers," but have completely reversed it to "accumulate followers to make money."
Fueled by paid shilling commissions and various incentive mechanisms, more and more KOLs are engaging in schemes that lead naive lambs straight into traps.
The course-selling bloggers on Money Twitter serve as a very apt reference point. Money Twitter differs slightly from sneaker Twitter; there really is a cohort running actual businesses and creating social value, whereas sneaker Twitter was almost purely a low-buy-high-sell game.
From this perspective, Money Twitter shares much more in common with crypto Twitter than sneaker Twitter does. Cool things are genuinely happening in the crypto world too, such as NYSE parent company ICE partnering with TradeXYZ to bring Hyperliquid-based perpetual contracts to the U.S. market.
But as readily available opportunities dwindle, those actually building real products are forced to share the spotlight with an increasing number of speculative scammers. These speculators are ruining the fun for everyone and tarnishing the entire industry's reputation.
Money Twitter was historically flooded with this type of person: obsessed with climbing the social ladder, packaging their personal brand, to relentlessly peddle low-quality info-products, rip-off courses, or ads to their audience.
After online business competition intensified and easy money dried up, some had an epiphany: it's far easier—and often more profitable—to sell the "illusion of successful wealth creation" to others rather than struggling to build a company yourself.
I don't think it's fair to label everyone selling courses or behind paywalls as a scammer; there truly are valuable insights worth paying for. My main point isn't against knowledge payment itself, but rather how the social ecosystem of an entire community distorts when "selling opportunities" becomes more profitable than "going out and grabbing them yourself."
Earlier, I explained how sneaker Twitter degenerated into a race-to-the-finish for dumping inventory. Crypto Twitter is now suffering from both dilemmas simultaneously: on one side, a race-to-the-bottom with chip involution; on the other, the "course-selling dilemma" typical of Money Twitter. Bloggers now peddling Memecoin wealth dreams are the new generation of course masters.
People are somewhat exaggerating the "Memecoin is dead" narrative today. There are already plenty of comments on this, and I won't dwell on it, but objectively speaking, the ordinary person's dream of getting rich quick flipping Memecoins is effectively shattered.
This is no longer a frontier battlefield where newcomers can make a name for themselves. It's an extremely "K-shaped divergent," social-resource-dominated game where those at the top of the pyramid continuously compound their advantages.
Sneaker reselling actually never fully disappeared; people still make money from it today. But that doesn't mean it's as tempting a business as it was at its peak. Memecoins are walking the same path: the mere existence of a market doesn't mean it's still a good game worth your full participation.
Of course, someday we'll still see moonshots reaching hundreds of millions or even billions, but the path for ordinary people to catch them will be as hard as climbing to heaven—like digging for gold in a minefield. The rewards might be huge, but the risk-reward ratio and win rates are abysmal.
The situation has deteriorated to this point: too many refuse to turn the page or admit that the golden age of asymmetric wealth creation has passed. Instead, they force this broken dream onto audiences, solely to create new exit liquidity for themselves.
The Kimchi saga perfectly illustrates this scene. Kimchi gained fame from the widely circulated story of making $40 million trading TRUMP, but that story was entirely fabricated as a joke by his friend. Rumors spread until it spiraled completely out of control.
Ironically, he later collaborated with Pump, which blatantly marketed "trade meme coins and you can become the next Kimchi." It's essentially "larp till you make it." The flagship story they used to sell the get-rich-quick dream was fake from start to finish.
And the current incentive structure only continues to exacerbate this behavior. For a new wave of entrants, prioritizing "becoming an influencer" over "being a trader" is a completely rational choice—assuming you can even call what they do trading.
After all, exchanges need volume, influencers need to monetize follower traffic, and neither side truly cares whether their followers actually make money.
What's particularly telling is how much tolerance the community has developed for this. In earlier years, bad actors were typically ostracized and exiled collectively because everyone wanted to guard the precious opportunities they barely found; nowadays, the same type of people are rewarded with massive commercial deals and bigger stages for traffic.
I believe fighting this trend head-on is pointless. You can't expect others to voluntarily step aside just to "not ruin the community" when a certain path is blatantly super profitable. Might as well let them play their game, and we simply unplug our internet cables and leave wherever they congregate.
The Collective Offline and Privatization of Smart Players
And that's exactly what's happening in reality. Many of the people who originally added real value to crypto Twitter are already quietly exiting the public timeline. Some have pivoted to US stocks, others have earned enough to retire offline, and a few are still doing crypto trading, but have completely moved to private spheres with zero interest in interacting with whatever remains of the public circles.
I believe this group's general direction is correct. I myself often swing back and forth between staying fully invisible or not. Honestly, I remain in this community because I believe in the long-term inevitability of Bitcoin and blockchain. But crypto Twitter's development has headed in the exact opposite direction, making it increasingly hard for me to find reasons to bother expending effort producing content in the public domain.
The original value of crypto Twitter was enabling those truly at the vanguard of trends to bounce ideas off each other and jointly uncover opportunities. Today, however, the vast majority of valuable conversations and intelligence have long since migrated to Telegram, private micro-groups, and other closed spaces.
As long as you break into the right network circles, you can thrive even if you completely block Twitter's public timeline. The genuine Alpha left to scrape together from timelines has become exceedingly rare.
Lately, the only thing I've felt motivated to do on Twitter is post some superficial market chit-chat. However, there are still quite a few people in the public domain far superior to me who continue to genuinely output value without harvesting leeks or pushing scams. I think these individuals are severely underrated.
I hastily put together a list of 100 high-quality accounts. I might update it in the future, or maybe get too lazy to bother—it's hard to say right now—but there are definitely plenty of other excellent accounts worthy of inclusion.
A fairly positive little subplot is that just as I'm writing this piece, some speculative "tourists" jumping on the bandwagon are already surrendering and exiting, which is quite encouraging.
I won't name names, but a certain individual who once livestreamed himself buying into a new trading pair and claimed he'd drag his followers into the crypto space (nobody asked him to do that, by the way) announced he's stepping back from crypto Twitter. His reason was "people always ruin the next great opportunity handed to them," implying he somehow considers himself that great opportunity.
The Great Decoupling: The Divergence Between Crypto Industry and Crypto Twitter
Using crypto circles' favorite buzzword, I'll also shout "decoupling." But this time, what's decoupling is the crypto industry itself versus crypto Twitter. Of course, I'm not here to pick tops or dodge bottoms. I actually feel crypto Twitter peaked well before the October 10th crash, and the decoupling had already silently taken place.
The most glaring contrast is laid bare: over the past year, average crypto Twitter users have been complaining all day about various launchpads, while the truly sharp cohort has long been executing seven-to-eight-figure perpetual contract trades, or uncovering premium on-chain targets like they did with early VVV and CARDS plays.
Curiously, that October 10th crash seems to have permanently altered the psychological baseline of crypto Twitter participants. It left a lingering shadow: any gains could vanish into thin air in the blink of an eye.
This fear, largely subconscious, further fuels a short-sighted, predatory mindset of "hit and run." The current U.S. President and their family harbor a similar attitude toward the crypto industry, which doesn't help matters either.
People have long grown accustomed to these kinds of harvests, no longer collectively kicking bad actors out of the door like they did a few years ago.
I wrote this article not to mindlessly pump the crypto market. I believe the mainstream adoption of crypto technology is irreversible; it's just that the way it evolves is vastly different from what crypto Twitter imagines.
In my view, crypto Twitter is becoming decoupled from the true trajectory of the crypto industry on a larger cyclical scale. Blockchain is evolving into a foundational pipeline for patching up outdated financial systems. It sounds boring, and while picking the right projects that solve real pain points offers its own speculative thrill, overall, it's nowhere near as exciting as making millions overnight from vaporware.
When Bitcoin rallies reignite market risk appetite, those frenzied moments will undoubtedly return, and people will lose their minds again, throwing hard cash into high-risk casinos. But these windows are fragile and fleeting, leaving the escape hatches for taking profits ever narrower.
Crypto Twitter's sentiment tracks Bitcoin price swings with extreme volatility, but bull runs merely paper over the underlying decay rather than curing it. Even if BTC enters a one-way bull market that temporarily makes everyone forget their troubles, participants' fundamental mindsets and playbooks will not change.
Price ceilings might be pushed higher, but the volume of rug pulls, scams, and malicious harvests will often surge proportionally, meaning the negatives might outweigh the positives when tallying everything up.
The on-chain mini-bull run from late August through September last year serves as a ready-made example: indeed, some tokens doubled or tripled rapidly, but the scale of siphoning and harvesting that played out during the same period was equally horrifying.
Concluding Thoughts
I didn't just call the top for crypto Twitter today; in fact, it peaked 12 to 18 months ago. This piece reads more like a collection of my observations to validate the judgment that the peak has passed, and to discuss where this circle flows next: perhaps bleak for some, but certainly not for others.
Looking long-term, I actually think this doesn't matter that much. The idea that a few launchpad drama and on-chain skirmishes can shake Bitcoin's long-term thesis is laughable in itself.
Crypto Twitter has a peculiar addictiveness built-in; I don't think this place will quickly turn into a ghost town. Instead, crowds will only grow more tribal and segmented, retreating into private spaces, becoming increasingly picky about who they engage with. Blocking keywords and accounts, meticulously curating follow lists, has long become the norm, and will only intensify moving forward.
Returning to Money Twitter and sneaker Twitter mentioned at the start of this article, two charts might intuitively illustrate my point. To some extent, Nike's stock price chart precisely outlines the complete lifecycle of sneaker Twitter:
Chart: Nike weekly stock price annotated with sneaker Twitter (ST) milestones: 2017 hype collabs to 2022 diluted peak (Source: TradingView)
By 2023, most of the sneaker crowd had scattered off to resell trading card games (TCGs), flip concert tickets, or start their own physical businesses.
The chart below is certainly less precise than the Nike example; it's purely my rough personal association regarding the correlation between crypto Twitter and the broader crypto industry, so take it with a grain of salt:
Chart: Amazon (AMZN) weekly trend compared to Money Twitter (MT) course-selling chaos hotspots: speculative course sales peaked in the 2021-2022 framed area, while the underlying industry continued upward (Source: TradingView)
The e-commerce sector as a whole has been trending upward almost continuously, but the niche Twitter community, hot topics, and arbitrage opportunities born around it peaked back in 2021 to 2022.
Of course, Amazon is far more than just an e-commerce company; it's a commercial behemoth. The real point here is: the sustained success of a major industry does not guarantee that the social circles who identified and harvested this emerging trend early on can continue holding equal dividends.
I'll also add briefly that Money Twitter covers a wide spectrum, encompassing almost all online businesses. While lurking, I noticed the mainstream themes centered on building private labels (some relying on dropshipping), info-products, agency operations, and affiliate marketing.
The sneaker Twitter story explains how participants cannibalized each other through increasingly aggressive vicious involution, directly destroying the very opportunities that originally attracted them.
The Money Twitter story, meanwhile, shows how participants slid from "making money by running actual businesses or trading" to "making money by monetizing their own social influence" when the original opportunities turned tasteless.
In this sense, today's crypto Twitter resembles Money Twitter more than it does sneaker Twitter. The crypto industry itself hasn't completely peaked like sneaker secondary culture, so crypto Twitter won't devolve into a completely empty ghost town either.
But crypto Twitter can become increasingly irrelevant to the future of the crypto industry without affecting the broader crypto world from continuing to grow stronger and larger.
The Alpha that once resided on crypto Twitter is now increasingly sinking into pure on-chain execution or hiding within the private circles of Discord and Telegram.
Not all public social media is inherently bad; there are still high-quality accounts striving to improve the space while expanding their influence. Filtering out the noise and focusing on tracking that specific cohort is simply the most rational approach.
And that niche corner of crypto Twitter that once allowed you to discover new opportunities, spark new ideas, and connect with smart people has pretty much come to an end, and honestly, there's nothing terribly wrong with that.