I've been lurking on Twitter since 2010, tweeting roughly once a year.
In summer 2022, I decided to try tweeting several times a week for 3-6 months.
This turned out to be my third-best decision of the year. [^1]
Turns out that the 240 character limit is a fantastic editor. I'm very late to this party, but... I just didn't get it until I started tweeting regularly.
As expected, I made a lot of nice connections. Unexpectedly, most of the best conversations were in my DMs, or on calls that were prompted by a Twitter exchange. The average value of the connections I made was... much higher than I expected.
To give a flavour: several information billionaires, one actual billionaire, one person I hired, several people I hope to work with in the future, several new friends. Also: a senior figure at Palantir, which led to an informal job interview for an interesting role on their Privacy & Civil Liberties team.
My tweets received over a million impressions and ended up on Marginal Revolution "Assorted Links" a couple of times. Marc Andreessen now follows me.
I started a company in October; my tweets helped with hiring.
Finally, I learnt quite a lot: through writing to learn, and in conversation.
So yes. Write tweets!
[^1]: The first was: asking Chloé to marry me. The second: changing a medication.
See also: [[How to use Twitter]].
# Appendix 1. Twitter stats
![[2023-01--twitter-review.jpeg]]
![[2023-01--twitter-review-2.gif]]
# Appendix 2. Start an alt
I also started an alt in July, and sent about 500 tweets in six months. 90% were love letters to my wife, and 10% were subtweets of her. It was fun.
For the first few months, my followers were just the six dear friends who were in the bar with me when I created the account. Since then, I told a few more trusted friends about the handle. For now, it's a friends-only protected account.