Comment by SL61 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SL61 | Hacker News Reader

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The thing with Twitter is you need a decent number of mutuals (i.e. they follow you and you follow them) to get a decent amount of high-quality interaction. On a new account with 0 followers, most people won't see you. Even if you reply to a popular tweet, most people will ignore your reply because of your low follower count.

I have two Twitter accounts: a pseudonymous one with a few hundred followers where I talk about my hobbies, and a professional one with a very low follower count where I talk about tech.

The first account is a lot of fun - I can post about something and 5-10 of my Twitter friends (people with shared interests who I only know via Twitter) will chat with me about it. The professional one is giving me the experience you're describing. A couple coworkers follow me and a few random people, but not enough of an audience for anyone to see my tweets. It feels like a waste of time.

I consider it a design flaw that Twitter makes it so hard to get your account off the ground. Sites like HN and Reddit allow you to jump in the conversation on a fresh account, but on Twitter you're just invisible. I got my first account up and running thanks to some real-life friends following me, and I can't imagine how to make my professional account stand out.

> The thing with Twitter is you need a decent number of mutuals (i.e. they follow you and you follow them) to get a decent amount of high-quality interaction.

I did that for an eletronics-related hobby of mine. Took a while, finally got it off the ground with some mutuals.

And then it felt... weird. Like I was compressing down my thoughts, for mostly performative purposes no less. I didn't like communicating with my peers that way instead of, say, per email or even chat (IRC, Discord, whatever). I felt I had to say "what was on my mind right now" instead of processing anything beforehand, but without the more direct conversational back and forth of chat.

Another problem I noticed: Almost every technical account with a minimum number of followers has this barrage of people that are doing quips, making dubious statements, or just asking simple or also dubious questions to almost every tweet, where even the questions seemed performative. Even the most kind and engaged originators seem to ignore them the overwhelming majority of the time, probably because it's too much to handle.

It was not for me. Unlike blogs, it did not add anything to my hobby.

Yup, getting it off the ground was the hard part!

My experience was exactly the same as what you've had with your professional account. LinkedIn just made more sense for professional stuff, so I stayed there.

In my case having a separate Twitter account for hobbies didn't make too much sense either since I didn't really have any, haha.

It wasn't until I figured out how to combine my personal and professional stuff that I really "got it". And even then, it's still quite a bit of work if you want to stay visible.

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