I finally got Twitter after years of not getting it

The only talk of "public forum" comes from people who are desperate to force others to listen to them. I don't need TERFs and neo-Nazis in my feed, but they want to be there.

A lot of people are familiar with the 90-9-1 rule regarding social networks. 90% is just lurking and never tweets, 9% might occasionally tweet, and 1% writes most tweets, or more accurately...writes the tweets that generate the most engagement.

What not everybody understands is that this rule pretty much also applies to every individual. If you have a 1000 followers, you should very much assume that 90% never even sees your tweets. 10% might see it, of which possibly 1% bothers to lift their finger and like it. An even smaller percentage might make the gigantic effort of typing a comment.

These numbers roughly play out on the author's twitter profile where the typical post has 0-1 likes with the occasional outlier of 3-5 likes, and in general...almost no comments at all. So the roughly 500 followers add up to this tiny amount of actual engagement that you can substantiate to about 5 people. It's a very rough guidance, but dividing followers by a 100 can't be far off in trying to come to a meaningful following.

If you think that's pessimistic, consider this extreme example:

https://twitter.com/nytimes

The NYTimes has a stunning 53M followers. When you scroll through their feed, notice how the typical tweet struggles to even get 100 likes or comments. There's the occasional outlier regarding politically impactful tweets, but even those fail to impress.

If we are to take their "typical" tweet and round that up to 100 likes / comments, which is already optimistic, we're talking about an engagement percentage of 0.0002%, or 1 in 5,000 followers engaging.

When you do this same exercise for somebody that truly gets Twitter, Elon Musk (for better or worse), we're talking about roughly 1 in 1,000 followers engaging.

This doesn't even account for bots. And it also doesn't go into the issue of actual engagement typically being of a very low quality, hardly enriching.

In my view, both Instagram and Twitter are not great for community building or rich conversations. Good old forums, reddit, HN, Discord and even Facebook groups are vastly superior at it.

I auto-delete my tweets after three months so shrug

So I had a Twitter account since 2009 but never really used it till a few months ago. I have some mixed feelings about it.

On one hand, I really love the consumption side (following people and reading their tweets): being able to follow interesting people and populate my feed with all kinds of great posts about topics I'm interested in. I've honestly been learning a lot and getting exposed to a lot more perspectives I'd never have been exposed to from just passively scrolling over the past few months. This alone makes it more than worthwhile in my books, and makes me wish I started using it sooner.

On the other hand, the production side (actually posting my own tweets) almost always feels like shouting into a void given my rather tiny follower count. I've done it enough times with the same outcome to the point that I've mostly given up on actually posting my own tweets, and have toned down my engagement on the platform to just replying to other people's tweets and retweeting things I find worth sharing.

I'm not saying this needs to change, it's the system working as intended. I imagine people with high follower counts probably get enough engagement on their tweets to make it a completely different experience, and it's totally fair. They've spent years building up an audience, I haven't, and the difference in reach/engagement is a natural consequence of that.

Though this is why HN still feels so special. Everything I write here stands on its own merits. Good comments rise to the top and bad ones get ignored/downvoted into oblivion. The algorithm doesn't care about who's writing it. Sure, it's not a perfect meritocracy. There's a ton of luck involved, famous people in the community will still get their usernames recognized and noticed/upvoted more often as a result, and the downvote-for-disagreement culture breeds a lot of groupthink. But I still love this place despite all of its warts.

You can turn off retweets for accounts that you follow, btw. I use lists in a third party app for a chronological feed.