Ask HN: Why can't I tweet?

[bigdang]

I have a personal twitter account with around 2k followers. But I haven't tweeted in over a year. I really kind of want to. It looks like fun. And it's good for building an audience. But there's something about posting a pithy opinion in < 200 characters that feels smug to me. More than that, I guess, is the feeling of permanence with every opinion. There's not been a time that I haven't looked back on something I said or wrote x number years ago without thinking, wow, I was an absolute moron.

How can I overcome self-consciousness and just tweet without GAF? Or am I doing the right thing and the people who tweet 100x/day are actually the weird ones?

[coldtea]

>I really kind of want to. It looks like fun. And it's good for building a personal brand. But there's something about posting a pithy opinion in < 200 characters that feels smug to me.

Well, "building a personal brand" is smug in itself, so there's that. Why would people care for/need another "personal brand"?

The only way to tweet and not be smug and not be weird / add to the noise is if you feel strong enough that you have something important to say.

If you don't, or worry that your opinions are just stuff you grow over, and lose all their value a few years later, then those are just casual thoughts and trivialities. (Something actually important seldom loses its value a few years later).

>How can I overcome self-consciousness and just tweet without GAF? Or am I doing the right thing and the people who tweet 100x/day are actually the weird ones?

I'd say the latter...

[bigdang]

Building a "personal brand" helps create a following around you so that when you build something new, you have people that are interested in it. Maybe "audience" is the better word.

> then those are just casual thoughts and trivialities.

This is all of Twitter, pretty much. Most people's tweets are literally farts of the mind, yet they have no problem sharing them without the slightest feeling of self-consciousness. And it works for them, I guess. That's the whole point of Twitter.

[coldtea]

>Building a "personal brand" helps create a following around you so that when you build something new, you have people that are interested in it. Maybe "audience" is the better word.

That's mostly for snake-oil salesmen, influencers, etc. People can just "have people interested in what they build" by building stuff. Dan Abramov e.g. didn't build any personal brand before creating Redux. Linus wasn't depending upon some pre-developed personal brand when he created Linux.

[cjbprime]

You could set up a script to delete each tweet two years after it's posted?

[bigdang]

I'm often embarrassed by an opinion I held even 30 days ago. I just can't participate in modern "current events" or discourse because I too strongly consider both sides of an argument, whereas Twitter seems to be about blindly embracing one side and advocating for it relentlessly.

[cjbprime]

Hm, I'm not sure what to say. I'm a pretty heavy (and argumentative) Twitter user and I've had many conversations there that changed my mind about something.

Your perpetual embarrassment reminds me a bit of the concept of "ladder anxiety" in gaming -- someone is worried about losing the game and showing that they're bad at it, so they can't bring themselves to play. Then, since they're not playing, they don't get better. It's a self-reinforcing cycle.

It might help you to see Twitter the same way. Okay, so you're embarrassed by old opinions. But this means that some of the opinions you hold right now are bad. How would you figure out which are which without discussing them and learning from other humans?

[bigdang]

Excellent points..