Early this year I launched ParetoFeed, a service that sends you daily emails with tweets from people you follow, filtered to your preferences. Today, about three months later, I am shutting it down.

𝕏 is a great place to discuss ideas, make friends, find jobs (I got two!), come across new products and businesses, share updates with your customers/audience, keep up with rapidly evolving technological advancements, or just scroll through memes and gossip if that's your thing. If you asked me to pick just one social media platform to be on, I'd recommend 𝕏, but only when used well. Unfortunately, 𝕏 makes it really difficult to use it well.

The default 𝕏 For you feed is anything but for you. It has gone the way of most other social media platforms by prioritizing the typical engagement-bait content designed to keep you hooked to the platform. The Following feed is slightly better, but its reverse chronological nature makes it over index towards high-frequency posters and your timezone. I'll always miss tweets from someone who posts sparsely, unless it goes viral.

ParetoFeed was my simple solution to this TikTokification of the 𝕏 feed. Provide the users you don't want to miss out from and state the type of content you want to see, and you get a daily email with all their posts from the last 24 hours filtered to your preferences. Only get the stuff you want to see, from people and sources you trust.

Unfortunately, as I have recently figured out, 𝕏's API terms does not allow you to sell anything you'd get from their API unless you're on the Enterprise plan which is I don't even know how many thousands of dollars a month. Web scraping is out of the picture too as in this age of LLM bots heavily scraping the web for training data, 𝕏 has developed advanced bot detection measures and is a sure way of getting my account suspended. I don't see much point in investing time and effort in growing something that systematically cannot grow.

To the 35 odd users who signed up and used ParetoFeed (against very little marketing effort from me), thank you! 

ParetoFeed is a success in my book because this is the first web app I built and deployed with real people using it! I learnt building a separate front-end and back-end, user authentication, payment integration, cron jobs, API calls with 𝕏 and OpenAI, database management, email integrations, redis and everything. If nothing else, it was a great exercise in building an app and deploying to production. Training that I am already putting to use to my next project!

ParetoFeed will be back in a new form. Maybe under a new name, but the idea of making it easier to extract signal from noise, save people time, and access content based on your preferences will live on. I'm excited, stay tuned.