Thread by @visakanv

i haven’t really bothered to make a deliberate effort to grow my twitter following or to write bangers etc in years, but i still have a clear sense of how to do it and i’ve advised other people who wanted to do the same, and witnessed them succeed. here are a couple of thoughts

one of the most important things you have to remember, especially if you’re still a small account starting out and trying to get more attention, is that people aren’t reading your tweets in isolation. your tweets are showing up as a 'beat' on a timeline

so if your tweet is something that’s moderately unclear or confusing, or has too many details, or the sentiment is too complex, people’s likeliest response is to scroll past it

this changes once people know you, care about you, believe that it’s worth the effort to decipher you

although even then, people are less likely to quote/RT tweets that are tedious to understand. until it crosses some threshold, if it was actually really good once it’s deciphered. crossing that threshold is often a function of how lucky you were re: early engagement compounding

even with larger accounts etc it can be quite arbitrary which tweets take off and which don’t, which is why imo as a poster you ought to have an internal sense of what’s important/good to you and then keep posting about it. many things only take off after repeated exposure

oftentimes when i have friends or peers who strike me as people with really interesting thoughts, but their twitter isn’t doing so well engagement-wise, it turns out it’s because they’re thinking like a blogger or speaker. they aren’t really perceiving the timeline properly

the bloggers tend to be overwrought (for twitter), and the speakers tend to be underwrought (for twitter). there’s a sweet spot of ‘computation’ that you want the reader to do.

math analogy: “what’s 2+2” is underwrought. “what’s 120592151 + 1205985215” is overwrought

yup. it’s hard to know *precisely* the correct/optimal range– it changes over time, depending on the state of the wider timeline and even like the political climate etc. but you can approximate it with some trial-and-error

2025-02-24

There’s a trick or knack here, where if you start the thread by inviting people into your thought process you can then take them up or down the wroughtness ladder, to coin an unwieldy phrase.

But that initial invite has to thread the needle.

one way of thinking about good reply game is that it identifies a frame that’s too big or too small, too X or too Y, and nudges it towards something marginally better in a way that’s still resonant with the OP’s frame. in this way we can actually make each other’s tweets better

if you have stuff that you think is good, don’t give up on it! just try talking about it repeatedly from different angles and zoom levels.

i know it can feel a little unnatural– my approach to making it natural is to just follow the cadence at which the thought naturally arises

one thing i always recommend esp to smaller accounts is to have something in your bio that’s inviting re: what kind of engagement you want. i often recommend framing it as like a research question, like “how to do X?” or “why do we Y?” etc. makes it easier for ppl to engage