This week I:

Your Twitter expertise is a mixture of content material consumption and content material creation. People see few downsides to simply posting so long as you don’t get cancelled or harass anybody, whereas the stuff you devour is what everyone seems to be cautioned about. Everyone talks about timelines crammed with rage and misinformation and bluechecks. But the posting isn’t separate from the doomscrolling, and it’s typically the more severe a part of the expertise.

Today I opened Twitter for quarter-hour, caught up on the French election and the conflict in Ukraine with insightful takes curated by my wonderful ingroup comply with checklist, laughed at some great jokes, and watched one video of animals being bros. Then I learn the worst tackle males and relationship I’ve seen in a decade, and I spent part of this decade doing non secular analysis on incel boards.

Normally I’d spend quarter-hour composing a snarky quote-tweet of that radioactive take, then spend the subsequent 4 hours coping with folks calling me an fool, people expressing their disgust with the actual fact I’m relationship in any respect and have takes on it, and totally different teams of people that didn’t get my level in several methods having a flame conflict in my feedback.

Instead I simply closed the app and went on with my day.

When I had 500 followers, posting on Twitter was nice. 500 individuals are an enormous and assorted sufficient group to get loads of engagement, however all of them mainly “communicate my language” — perceive after I’m joking or critical, after I’m decoupling or contextualizing, and the concepts and ideas I take advantage of. But there are lots fewer folks in my cozy conceptual neighborhood than exterior it, and the subsequent 9,500 followers principally got here from the surface. They don’t “get me” naturally, which forces me to both dumb down my fashion and simplify my factors or cope with a deluge of dumb replies. I’ll strive to withstand the pull, however the viewers inevitably shapes the content material and my content material is how I feel. I don’t need my pondering to get dumb, simplified, and defensive.

Also, in 2019 after I wasn’t energetic on Twitter I revealed 33 weblog posts. In 2020 that quantity was down barely to 27, and as my Twitter exploded in 2021 I wrote solely 15. I used to be discovering it more durable to justify spending 20 hours sharpening an thought right into a weblog put up after I may put up a brief thread on Twitter in 10 minutes and get 10 instances the engagement.

But as my Twitter following grew, I spotted that I used to be sacrificing high quality for amount, each in my writing and the engagement it will get. Just as we speak an outdated put up of mine obtained a shout out from Scott Alexander, and tomorrow I’m assembly for dinner an exquisite lady who crammed out the Putanumonit relationship type. I used to be reminded that superior folks learn this weblog, even when they’re not as salient to me as a author because the addictive rhythm of Twitter likes and feedback.

So, I’m going to experiment with an intermediate strategy: a collection of way more frequent and shorter weblog posts that might’ve been a Twitter thread final month. I’ll attempt to write 3 each week for the subsequent few weeks, every 300-1000 phrases as a substitute of 2000-3000 like most of my longer posts. Instead of Tweeting issues out the second I consider them or struggling for 2 weeks to mix a number of concepts in a coherent longform, I’ll see what comes out of cogitating for a day or two on no matter catches my consideration. I gained’t plan these upfront, and I’ll attempt to write them multi functional sitting with little enhancing.

If you subscribed for rarer, extra thought-out posts you possibly can all the time unsubscribe and verify in on the mini-posts at your leisure. Otherwise, stick round and I’ll see you once more quickly.


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