[rektide]

> Finally, I felt irrelevant on Twitter.

This is like the first boss of tbe internet. Glad someone can at least confess to this, clarify this point. Understanding & welcoming this is a key pivot.

People will slowly trickle in & follow you if you contribute. The reward ks highly chaotic, statistical, makes little clear sense. But just showing up & saying reasonable things is a pretty lock long term win.

[affectsk]

Yep, and the cool part is you don't need a lot to start feeling relevant.

At least I didn't. A few weeks of consistently showing up and interacting with the same people made them start recognizing me, and that was enough to stop feeling like I'm just tweeting into the void here.

Now a few months and a few hundred followers later I'm finally at a point where I can simply ask "my" Twitter for feedback or share a thought and actually get some engagement. That felt like going from 0 to 1, and it was the hardest part.

A few hundred followers is still nothing in the grand scheme of Twitter things, but it's enough not to feel irrelevant since they're genuine and actually engage with me.

[rodgerd]

> Yep, and the cool part is you don't need a lot to start feeling relevant.

"Being relevant" isn't really my goal on Twitter. Chatting to people is. Sometimes I get to learn stuff. It's supposed to be social.

[affectsk]

That's pretty much what I mean by "being relevant", just my way of putting it.

Socializing and learning stuff, but in a way that doesn't feel like I'm shouting into the void.

[sshlocalhost98]

Yes, I agree on this. I am writing machine learning topics on twitters and researchers flock to my blog and comments. Great to see collaboration

[affectsk]

Yep, I've found that if you're really good at what you do and/or have a narrow enough niche you'll have a much easier time getting people to interact with you.

If you're just alright and/or don't have a narrow niche, you need to give them more reasons to follow/interact with you. This is my case. I don't consider myself an expert in anything, and being a generalist I'm interested in a lot of stuff.

So even if people don't find my tweets or articles unique or extraordinary, many of them tend to stick around because of my personality. At least I got that!

[sshlocalhost98]

Awesome!