I had the same thought. So I did a bit of digging into it, turns out they are just rehashing the same tweet again and again. Just with different wording. When a new popular tweet pops up, everyone copies each other. It's an echo chamber down there.

As an experiment, you can try to choose a random popular tweet from your timeline. Look into their profile. And I bet there's a high chance you can find the same or very similar tweet a few months or year prior

> I don't know if I'm in an algorithmic rabbit hole, but my Twitter shows hundreds of people like this talking about how much they are making, how many signups they are getting for their products, how many Twitter followers they have.

I’ve followed a lot of them. Maybe 100 at one point?

I love watching people build little businesses, iterate, and find success. It was really cool to see them all working on their various things, celebrating the little wins, and sharing things they learned along the way.

But to be honest, I’ve gradually unfollowed most of them. Many of them got a little too into the self-promotion angle and their content became repetitive “follow me for more content like this” bits. It felt like half of them were repeating same variations of the popular topic of the week every week, because they were! When threads were the thing to do I’d see the same topic rehashed to death in thread form for about 2 weeks by different people until they all moved on to the next topic.

Another chunk of them slowly pivoted from their own business to selling courses, educational materials, or “pay $499 to access my private community of builders” deals. I hit the unfollow button as soon as they pivot to this stuff.

There are a few that I still follow, but if I’m being honest I don’t know that I’ve learned a whole lot. The most successful ones always have their business success wrapped up largely in their giant social media followings, which turns into a game of how well they can market to their audience without being off putting. The most famous example is the levels.io guy, who is by all means an honest and great guy but nevertheless appears to be making businesses that spread by word-of-Twitter because he has such an audience. Nothing wrong with that, really, but after watching it for a few years you realize that it’s not repeatable unless you can play the Twitter game successfully at massive scale, which is what a lot of these influencers and up trying with mixed success.

Agree with this, it's mostly talking about numbers and the success instead of the product itself [which you'd expect to be the forefront of all their posts as its the main reason they are tweeting?]

And author of this article is happy about #1 on front page of HN https://twitter.com/tdinh_me/status/1705597632876626166

And there is one with critique of HN comments, like https://twitter.com/LBacaj/status/1705601091981754482

> @LBacaj This top comment on HN, to this post on getting to $45K/MO, captures everything wrong with the developer mindset today. > ”everything has to be crazy hard technically or it’s not valuable.” > You’ve all been duped into delusions of grandeur, only so they can take advantage of you.

> @circleseer HN has become the old man yelling at the cloud meme

> @madmaxbr5 A pizza shop is just a thin rapper around the agricultural supply chain and restaurant equipment industry. The recipes are centuries old. Zero actual innovation.

Its exactly the same spiel as all these Amazon seller “gurus” on Youtube telling you how to sell properly and how much they are making, but they only make money with their courses, etc…

If you hang out long enough on indiehackers you realize most of the people there dont want to create businesses, they just want to amass more followers and readers in order to peddle their “dev tools” or whatever

There is no courses being sold here though. Isn't this part of being transparent? HN often complains about non-transparent pricing in SaaS pricing pages but now complains about an indie dev telling all about the revenues and the relevant metrics that lead to this revenue?

I am baffled.

Mine was a general comment about this solopreneur/buildinpublic community works rather than any individual.

That said, I think I’ve worked out the model since yesterday. It works by building a tool for solopreneurs and then talking about your success as a solopreneur to attract them.

Another red flag: "Sign up for my free newsletter/access video tutorials" which turns into an upsell for an expensive "masterclass"/private discussion group. In the Amazon passive income universe, these typically run $1500/year.