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Comment by RobertRoberts | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain why they would ever put something on Twitter that is not marketing related? (I get it for business, but why for personal use?)

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This question needs to be asked more often. It took me quite a while to realize why I'm more engaged on Twitter than I used to be.

In my case, it's to have a conversation. Before I moved to the United States, I could have all sorts of conversations with people at work, no matter how controversial or stupid or weird. But in the US, the culture is different. There are things that you can't discuss with your coworkers, for various reasons.

When the pandemic hit and I stopped going to the office, that made the problem even worse. Sure, I didn't have any real friends here, but at least there was more randomness and diversity in my social life. I love my family, but it's an extremely limited pool of people to talk to.

So I found myself participating more and more on Twitter, on Imgur, and on certain game forums. Which, in turn, had the same impact on me as Facebook used to before I closed my account.

My own, very personal conclusion, is that the society in the United States suffers from a "disease" of alienating people from each other and isolating them, making them turn to social networks to fill the void left by the absence of what used to be normal, every day way to socialize.

Then again, I'm just a sample of one, so my conclusion is almost certain to be wrong.

> the society in the United States suffers from a "disease" of alienating people from each other and isolating them

Is that unique to the US? It feels like something broadly true if I believe what I see in the news and online forums, but in my personal life it does not feel true at all.

I can't say whether it's unique to the US, because I've only lived in two other countries before moving here. Also, I've spent all these years since I moved to the US living in the same county of the same state, a state so notorious for how hard it is to make friends, that there's a name for the phenomenon: Seattle Freeze.

On the other hand, I've talked to a lot of other immigrants who lived in different states before this, and the general consensus (in that admittedly small sample) is that the US is definitely different from South America or Europe in that sense.

For context, I lived in Chile before I moved to the US, and Chile is the country in South America that tries the hardest to be like the US. Even in Chile, it's easier to have a richer social life than here, despite longer working hours and longer commutes, which both result in having much less free time. My own theory is because you get to socialize more at work and, if you have a kid that goes to kindergarten or school, with other parents. Here? "Not so much" would be an understatement.

Probably for the same reasons you just posted this comment.

But I only post here because this community is worth interacting with.

Twitter's community is the entire world. (as far as I know)

According to the article, Twitter only makes up 25% of America, let alone the world.

Many artists use it as a platform to show their art. I'm betting it's more popular than DeviantArt for this purpose, for example.

Wouldn't that be marketing? Private, but marketing still. At least if those artist also provide commercial services.

So a lot of artists post works they've done, and are open for commissions, and post the commissioned art or a retweet to the commissioner's account. This is marketing I guess but not what I typically think of as "fake PR" or "here's a notification of our service with a teaser of content" type of marketing

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