[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.