About 2 years ago I started using twitter in a different way: trying to get to know people I don’t know. This has had some good effects. It has been weird in some ways. I don’t think it’s had downsides, besides maybe wasting time.

what? how? that seems nuts

I … don’t know? All social media is weird, twitter doubly so, but it’s actually pretty nice if you use it in the right ways. And I’ve always been skeptical of forming real connections on the internet, but you definitely can.

I suppose I started by following a list of people helpfully compiled for me by the genie from Aladdin. Then just start replying to people, making good conversation, and, well, there you go.

who are they?

Usually I start with something like: you know the Berkeley rationalists? Eliezer Yudkowsky, Robin Hanson, Scott Alexander, etc, LessWrong, Slate Star Codex? A bunch of people read their stuff and thought, yeah it’s cool to think more rationally, but it’s not that cool, c’mon, there’s got to be more to it than that. And then some of them went into niches of therapy, some went into body-centered stuff, some into meditation, psychedelics, astrology, uh rock climbing, I dunno, there’s a pretty wide gamut of stuff that this group is into.

But they’re nerds in at least sorta the same way that I’m a nerd, I feel? Some labels people have used include “tpot” (this part of twitter), “ingroup”, and “postrats” (post-rationalists), though most people hate all these labels.

how’s it going now?

I don’t have a lot of deep friends from it, but I have some solid friends who have helped me through difficult times (mostly on a discord hosted by aforementioned genie). I have some acquaintances who do interesting things that I like to follow. I have some friends I like to post jokes with. Plus there are still my friends who I know from offline, and it’s fun to post things with them too.

vibecamp?

Oh yeah, a month or so ago, I went to a campground in Maryland with like 800 of these people. It felt like a conference, but fun: we were all interested to meet new people, it helped to bring something so you had something to talk about, there were lots of pretty neat events. I did some putting-names-to-faces and a lot more learning-new-faces. And juggling, teaching juggling, singing meditation, tai chi and qigong, singing campfire songs, swimming, drinking kava, fighting, discussing psychedelics, origami, coffee brewing, feeling your fascia, dancing with and without metta meditation, visualizing, men’s-circle-ing, tarot, talking astrology, &c. So that’s the kind of crowd.

some thoughts

• it’s weird to meet people on twitter. it’s even harder than IRL to transition from “acquaintance” to “friend” I think, because you mostly interact by sending public statements.
• it’s weird to be so twitter-focused while, y’know, El*n is running it into the ground. hope it survives!
• it’s really nice to have a way to interact with some people I know in two minutes between other things I’m doing. makes me feel a little less isolated.
• it’s weird that, being on twitter, there’s a built-in “how popular are you” number. If you interact with someone new, you immediately know if they’re a 400-follower nobody, or a 10k-follower Niche Internet Microcelebrity. This colors my interactions so much! I wish I were better at “just being cool”, regardless of people’s Popularity Score, but alas
• who are all these followers? I mean dunbar’s number etc - how can there be 3k or 10k or 50k people who follow you “just for posting stuff”? and if you have, say, 3k followers, how many of them interact at all? I feel like kind of a lurker, but I must be more active than 99% of people, because I’ll be one of the, say, 50 replies on a 10k account’s tweet! It’s the internet’s 90-9-1 rule again, I guess.
• but if I’ve been pretty active for 2 years and only have 400 followers… the thought keeps creeping in: “what am I doing wrong?” I just try not to think about it and just have fun doing what I’m doing. Chasing popularity, especially Goodhart-able popularity metrics, seems a recipe for sadness.
• Anyway, status games aren’t anything new - academic conferences had them too! You know who’s a tenured prof, pre-tenure prof, grad student, postdoc, etc. And you know whose work is super popular and who’s squeaking by at a no-name university. I think some part of me actually enjoys status games.
• Status games get more fraught, though, in nerd-spaces, because I feel the urge to show “I’m a cool nerd, not a nerd nerd.” This was activated by the lemur thread, and the constant chatter about how Vibecamp was like 80% men, but is just always present in my mind. I’m always happier when I stop paying attention to stuff like this.