Read on Twitter
thinking about the relationship between popularity, quality & weirdness, i.e. why are there so many great twitter accounts with 500-5000 followers? why are bands better before they get big?
I believe the average quality of my tweets has slightly improved as my follower count has increased. maybe I am getting entrained by the network, plugged into a nutritious feedstock of memes. I'm learning how to ask good questions https://twitter.com/RichDecibels/status/1331963722580041728
I've sent 10K+ tweets so I get a lot of feedback about what the network wants. But my audience is still small enough that we are all weirdos.
Very large accounts are mostly not interesting at all. e.g. @naval is the archetype: with 1M followers he's producing the Hallmark-card version of insight. There's no joy, no eroticism, no rock'n'roll, no soul.
So maybe the feedback loop between me and the network has a sweet spot between popularity & weirdness. Enough popularity provides good training. but with too much popularity the feedback overwhelms the weird (ie. the novel, edgy, unexpected) in favour of the norm.
Most recently I think I saw @harveykrishna_ cross the first threshold. Definitely weird, but plugged in enough to be able to produce a perfect meme-smoothie to tickle me and few hundred other weirdos like us: https://twitter.com/harveykrishna_/status/1333664022583885830
I'm glad we knew you before you were famous!
I'm glad we knew you before you were famous!
