| So I had a Twitter account since 2009 but never really used it till a few months ago. I have some mixed feelings about it. On one hand, I really love the consumption side (following people and reading their tweets): being able to follow interesting people and populate my feed with all kinds of great posts about topics I'm interested in. I've honestly been learning a lot and getting exposed to a lot more perspectives I'd never have been exposed to from just passively scrolling over the past few months. This alone makes it more than worthwhile in my books, and makes me wish I started using it sooner. On the other hand, the production side (actually posting my own tweets) almost always feels like shouting into a void given my rather tiny follower count. I've done it enough times with the same outcome to the point that I've mostly given up on actually posting my own tweets, and have toned down my engagement on the platform to just replying to other people's tweets and retweeting things I find worth sharing. I'm not saying this needs to change, it's the system working as intended. I imagine people with high follower counts probably get enough engagement on their tweets to make it a completely different experience, and it's totally fair. They've spent years building up an audience, I haven't, and the difference in reach/engagement is a natural consequence of that. Though this is why HN still feels so special. Everything I write here stands on its own merits. Good comments rise to the top and bad ones get ignored/downvoted into oblivion. The algorithm doesn't care about who's writing it. Sure, it's not a perfect meritocracy. There's a ton of luck involved, famous people in the community will still get their usernames recognized and noticed/upvoted more often as a result, and the downvote-for-disagreement culture breeds a lot of groupthink. But I still love this place despite all of its warts. |