Read on Twitter
I am going to try and describe something people in my mentions with <1k followers often don’t realize about the twitter experience for people with 10k>.
What I am about to say isn’t quite true for all 10k+ers, especially if they are part of some really obscure niche internet community where all 10k are fellow travelers (and no one else has heard of them).
The more followers you have the harder it’s gets. This is partially because you just get exposed to more trolls, assholes, and so forth as you are exposed to more people.
Burn the bigger problem is that your words get exposed to more *communities* of people. Communities whose base assumptions about how the world works are 100% different than yours.
In the pre twitter world all of these communities were more or less separated from each other. Blogs were like little ecosystems of like minded folks, and magazines of course were tailored to specific communities.
Twitter for the person with 500 followers is still like this. You are followed mostly by people who share your main commitments, and when they don’t they at least think you are interesting. Honest debate and engagement is easy in this environment.
It isn’t quite possible to talk to people honestly who don’t share your commitments—but the way you do is very different from engaging people who agree with you on 85%. But on twitter you project to everyone at once.
This already makes things difficult. But as you grow in followers count you start to see more and more people follow you because they think of you as a representative of a certain kind of thought, or as a key voice in a particular conversation they care about.
That is to say they follow you less because they are sympathetic or even just interested in your ideas and more to keep tabs. Some of them actually hate your ideas. “Hate follows.”
The trouble with twitter is that’s it makes it easy for these people to take what they dislike and project it into communities it was not really intended for as the perfect example of what they all should be hating.
So if you have a large follower account twitter is mostly experienced like this: you share a thought optimized for group x. Members of group y,z, and v automatically start sharing it as the textbook example of why group x deserves crucifixion.
You are just constantly exposed to entire communities whose members will treat you as an enemy to be defeated or humiliated the minute they become aware of you. This is often.
People with like 500 followers are rarely trotted out as the example of all that is wrong with the world, whereas anyone with a higher follower count knows this is the default state of your mentions on any given weekend.
*sigh* my phone autocorrects mispellings of “is” as “isn’t”.
Anyways, I suppose this really just an explanation for why my gf loves twitter whereas I have a lot of sympathy for this https://twitter.com/Millicentsomer/status/1281414271692234753 and might be in full agreement with another 50k followers added on
Parting thought: I suspect whole class of pundits who came of age in the 2010s have very much internalized, as this chick did, the idea that this is what discussion *is.* Of course they don’t believe in free speech, liberalism, et al. Their public sphere has always been a brawl.
And now I have a longer, full essay treatment of the same observations, fleshed out with a comparison with the public sphere that came before, the Blogosphere: https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2020/07/the-world-that-twitter-made.html
