In October, I’m planning to focus my writing a bit more on Twitter. I will put all my writing energy into crafting the most amazing threads and Tweets you have ever seen.
As much as I love exchanging emails with my subscribers, Twitter is just much faster. This allows me to get feedback on ideas before sending them to your inbox, skipping the mediocre ones and doubling down where I stumble upon something interesting. I feel like I can get more out of Twitter, and I’m planning to experiment in November. I’ll report in another email after a month.
In the meantime, follow me to, well, follow this process.
Some resources about Twitter
If you follow one person except me on Twitter, it should be Visakan. Just by having him on my timeline, I transformed my experience on the platform from a frantic hellhole to a heartfelt chat with friends.
The key feature of (public) Twitter is that any player can interact with any other player. Any player can reply to any other player’s tweets, or retweet it, or quote-tweet it. This bypasses traditional limitations of both “real life” as well as older web mediums like “blogs”.
I can’t entirely agree with Venkatesh about WordPress being obsolete, but his piece about the nature of text points out why Twitter is likely not going away.
It implements a few key features of 1980s vintage hypertext visions — block-level addressability, transclusion (changes in referenced blocks being “transfer-included” wherever they are cited), and bidirectional linking — that utterly transform the writing experience at the finger-tips leve
The ultimate guide to writing online
David Perrell’s idea of the content triangle inspired me to double down on Twitter. He tests his ideas on Twitter and in conversation, much like comedians iterate on jokes in smaller clubs before going on National Tv (or Netflix).
Many writers wait until they publish a blog post to share an idea with somebody. I do the opposite. I share my ideas as much as I can and run them through numerous filters. I move from conversations, to tweets, to emails, to blog posts. Each medium provides a different layer of feedback. By the time I’ve published a blog post, I’ve run the ideas through 3-5 filters, and each time I receive feedback, I keep more of what resonates and less of what doesn’t.
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