When I signed up for Twitter in October 2008 (I was 18 then) I had no idea that it was going to be such an important part of my life in my late 20s and early 30s. I started by following my favorite celebrities (I remember Pink, 50 Cent, Dita von Teese, John Mayer etc were a bunch of people who were active on it pretty early on), my IRL friends from Singapore, and just a bunch of interesting people generally. I wasn’t super active though. I tried to post from time to time but it didn’t seem like anybody cared.
I’ve always been active online on multiple fronts – I was also posting on Reddit at the time, blogging, writing Facebook status essays, Tumblr. (Looks like I started my Tumblr in April 2010, and started posting more regularly in September 2010). I started a local Facebook group in 2010 that I was really proud of, which was active for about a year or two, which was an early example of me “running a community”, and I learned a lot from that.
In 2013 I started working, doing marketing for a software company, and so I would look for all sorts of ways to “increase the footprint” of the company. Mainly through the blog, but I’d also try to find other channels. And Twitter was a channel that I found particularly fruitful throughout 2013-2016 or so. You could reach out directly to people with your content, you could create content in response to whatever was going viral. I remember feeling really clever when I came up with the idea of including public figures’ @-handles in the title of a blogpost, so that when people shared the blogpost, the person would be @-mentioned. I grew the company’s Twitter following from about 150 to about 2000, which was larger than my own personal Twitter at the time (something like 800?), and that was pretty exciting to witness.
Along the way I found myself “getting a sense” of a bunch of people. This feels like a very vague thing to say, but I’m not sure how to say it more precisely. I started to get a sense of the relationships between people, but it was all quite vague and nebulous. You start to notice who talks to who, who quotes who, and so on. I realise now that this is something that I’m pretty good at, that most people probably don’t think very much about, or make a very deliberate effort to study and understand. For me, as a cultural outsider, I’ve always found this to be a fairly important thing to do. To be dramatic about it, it’s a matter of social survival. Or it was, at some point, when I was a misfit minority tall weirdo with a strange name, and I needed to figure out how I was going to fit in, or otherwise be a highly visible Other.
In the earlier days I spent a lot of time on Internet forums. Video game forums, the local music forum, and I got a lot of experience posting and witnessing other people’s posts, witnessing how people responded to them. Figuring out what makes a post good, and how some kinds of content are appreciated more on some platforms, some aren’t, and how there are certain universal principles that apply in almost all contexts. I got very good at posting, basically. And now I can even kind of tell when someone is “on a trajectory”, meaning I can fairly confidently guess how well somebody is going to do in this domain, how much they’re going to grow their following. I still kind of underplay my understanding in this sphere, because I worry about overplaying it. Better to be slow and mostly correct, in my view, than to be overly aggressive and wind up with costly mistakes.
Anyway, in the past 3-4 years or so, I’ve grown quite an audience on Twitter, that I’m really proud of. It’s a very thoughtful, kind, nerdy, supportive, encouraging audience, and I’ve had a ball of a time introducing people to each other, trying to seed a creative scene of people from all over the world with complementary vibes. This has had all sorts of lovely second-order effects, many of which I probably haven’t even noticed or perceived. It’s a blessing. And yet… I’ve started to feel – and this is not the first time I’m feeling this, I’ve had some versions of this thought for a couple of years now – that I might be spending too much time on Twitter, and that it’s time for me to start doing other things. And to my credit, I have certainly branched out. I’ve started a YouTube channel, which is slowly growing. The comments section is particularly great and I’m very proud of that. I’ve also more recently started posting on TikTok, which is kind of fun and interesting, but I haven’t exactly been throwing myself into that all that hard, I think because so much of my mind is currently occupied with the book that I’m working on (Introspect).
Anyway. I think this was supposed to be a post about my relationship with twitter, and it’s been somewhat interesting to walk through it, but really the thing I want to be focusing on right now is finishing my book. I just made a short YouTube video talking about my fears associated with it. I think rather than think “tweet less”, which is something I find to be a bit “scarcity-mindset-ish”, I should instead focus on what is the outcome I want. Which is that I want to build my central corpus. I want to ship my book, and I want to have excellent blogposts, youtube videos, podcast episodes and more, so that I become more accessible to a wider group of people. My current system of tweeting like a maniac has continued to pay off in a particular way (my audience keeps growing bigger), but the nature of Twitter as a medium means that I can’t really expect anybody to sit down and read my stuff in depth. So I want to increasingly spend more time updating my blog. I’d also like to return to posting more wordvomits, and practice writing essays again. I think this focus will be productive and beneficial for me.
“Now I can even kind of tell when someone is “on a trajectory”, meaning I can fairly confidently guess how well somebody is going to do in this domain, how much they’re going to grow their following”
I be interested to hear more about how you can tell 🙂
it’s hard to pin down onto a few things, it’s a more generalised awareness of the sum of their actions, inclinations, responses, etc