how to be yourself online

my thoughts on poasting

I tweet a lot in a specific corner of twitter, where people tend to be engaged, intellectually curious and openminded. Here are my thoughts on poasting:

Treat twitter like it is a void. No one exists. You are a lowbie. You are standing on a rock overlooking a vast landscape, or perhaps at the edge of the world, or whispering into a tree. Mods are asleep. You can just say shit. Things that come back may tickle but not hurt, because again no one else exists.

(Yes so this is a mildly solipsistic take but if you’re trying to “be yourself” you’re probably overthinking things already…)

Imagine yourself sitting in a dark hole and scrittering around making jokes and being generally nonsensical for no reason.

Replies can be insightful and helpful at best, and at worst no one replies or you can ignore replies. You can also delete top level tweets if there are too many creatures out at night.

Occasionally you can shout out, HEY does anyone want to talk to me about X? And ideally someone out there responds.

Treat twitter like your notes app. Jot down ideas, connect dots. Document notes from interesting articles or meetups. Post pictures of art/films/book excerpts. Go down a rabbit hole of your favorite creator and share it for others’ benefit.

Use twitter to develop your taste. Collect your favorite things and put them all in a thread. Once everything is aggregated it has a powerful distillation effect that shows you your own taste.

Look back at your own posts and collect metadata. This becomes sort of like journaling and meta journaling. I’ve noticed patterns in my tweeting style/phrases depending on what I’m going through at that time in my life.

I don’t really think about “cultivating a persona” or being some kind of account. I will occasionally joke about it but it’s not something I dwell upon. Because what’s the point when it’s just you…

Again, you are primarily interacting with *yourself*. Cry out into the void, and cry back at yourself. You are both the shouter and the void.

Play around with different posting patterns, phrases, etc and see what naturally become personal memes. For example, I will often use the phrase pattern “every now and then” from Fear & Loathing to describe a mood:

That’s all for this post— hope this helps!