i first signed up for twitter because i was going to a furry convention and it was effectively like an ad hoc group chat with a bunch of people who were also there. after that it turned out to be a cool little adhd box so i kept typing things into it
then i wrote an Epic Lulz Takedown of php on my rinky-dink blog and it exploded. there was a link to my twitter on my blog somewhere, i guess, and i got several thousand twitter followers overnight. suddenly i had an Audience, of complete strangers. and i liked babbling about computers so that was fine. i did more posting, and the tech people now following my blog's atom feed read it and put it on reddit and HN, and number went up. which is nice because i like numbers. felt like a score.
later i would discover that working for a tech company was sapping my will to live, and go off to do my own thing. that meant leaning into the following business plan
- tech blogging
- ???
- profit (patreon)
it did sort of work, although i don't understand why. i would write a post about funny unicode characters and well-paid tech people would give me $20 at a time. i put some milestones for writing more things per month, but i ran kind of low on ideas and it was starting to stress me out a bit in the same way my job had
then some weird and kind of fucked up stuff happened
first was kiwi farms coming after my spouse in 2018, which led to sizable chunks of several social circles we were adjacent to turning on us. the Good Number dropped like a rock, and so did the patreon dollars.
i don't want to super get into that right now, but ever since then i've felt like my tweets are more aggressively defiant, always proactively bracing against a nebulous antagonist that might show up at any time and with any size. seemingly the only defense was to present myself as someone you don't want to mess with. the fox bristles to seem bigger, so as to ward off its enemies. (it didn't help that one of the 2018 events was someone digging up an exceptionally bad — or, at least, very poorly expressed — take i'd had in 2012... in the form of a tweet.)
on the other end of the spectrum, i found that mild niceties like complimenting an artist's work would increase the chances that they'd notice me, and if they'd already heard stuff about me and didn't like it, they'd obviously block me. and this makes sense and doesn't mean that the compliment was a wrong thing to do in the first place, but to my mildly traumatized caveman brain it sure felt like it, so i stopped really doing that.
but then the nft thing happened, and i am a mildly eloquent tech groucher, so i made some very pointed tweets dunking on them as a whole concept, at just the right time for ten thousand new people to follow me. and suddenly the audience was mostly people i don't know.
and all through this i am struggling to keep patreon viable, but i can't summon up the willpower to spend days in a row on big informative blog posts any more, especially knowing they'll then get blasted out to thousands of strangers. why risk some nightmare scenario like kf callouts meeting hacker news comments, when i could simply, not?
so now i'm relying on two things: tweeting, and the actual stuff i make. and like, people love my tweets still i guess. i get 1k+ likes somewhat regularly, sometimes on totally unexpected stuff. this is an audience that came from twitter rather than from hacker news, so it's people who use twitter and appreciate twitter culture. on the other hand, "give me two dollars because i told a joke you like" is a somewhat harder sell.
so that leaves stuff i make. i've still chugged along making little games and gizmos this whole time, and i err on the side of releasing them for free because it just feels bad to charge for something that costs me zero to duplicate. but a difficult text adventure about my cat is far more niche than a post about unicode blocks, something that almost every programmer will have to deal with at some point.
so that leaves me trying to make twitter bangers and interesting work and just sort of hoping that this will lead to patrons via some kind of magical alchemy, since, after all, i don't really understand why people pledged real money for blog posts either. and meanwhile it's a little bit discouraging all of the time that the things i care about a lot are not the things that these strangers are drawn to me for
like i basically hid in a cave for 6~8 months to write a chip's challenge emulator, a work of 100% passion-spite, because an update had broken chip's challenge 2 in wine for years and there were only emulators for chip's challenge 1. and i was really proud of it! i think it is cool as hell. i thought maybe it would catch on a little bit. and it mostly did not. i think a few people play it sometimes but i've only seen two people talk about it or even link a level they made with it, and i know them both personally.
that's just how it goes, i know. but it makes me a little nervous for the passion game i've been poking at for years, which i want to try to sell when it's done. how am i going to manage that if i can't even drum up interest in a free game that already has free nostalgia?
we got some minor games press coverage, you know. exactly once. within 48 hours someone had made a vague comment about drama surrounding my spouse, and the editor quietly removed the mention of our game. no one involved ever once tried to contact us.
but then enter twitter's sale and slow demise, and i start poking around the ol' mastodon account and cohost. and i discover that a big flock of familiar faces instantly follow, and many of them are the same people still on the patreon, the same avatars i enjoy seeing in my twitter replies. and i wonder what was even the point of the thousands of twitter followers? even when i am trying to transmute them into a livelihood, did that audience actually help? when the things i really like making are more personal and not this lowest common denominator stuff, does a crowd of strangers do anything?
i look at mastodon and i have 4k followers and so many of them are tech people with photos as avatars. just like the initial swarm on twitter. and i don't know what to post there. i end up only talking about mastodon itself because that's what they expect. i try posting adult art with a cw and i mostly feel a tension, like i've made worlds collide for those people.
i don't think i appreciated how much i squeeze myself into a box on twitter. used to be that my most appreciated tweets were cat photos and half my followers could name them all. that is... somewhat less true now, but i also stopped posting as many cat photos after kf used them to doxx us, so i just bitch i guess and the audience eats it up. meanwhile my timeline is half full of screenshots of alt-right horror figures i blocked eight years ago, seemingly no matter how many of my friends — acquaintances? — i mute.
i don't like it but it's not just the numbers. i still like to know if folks like a thing i said, i think. it's a whole culture, combined with baffling financial incentives, topped off with a half-invented bad reputation that any given person may or may not care a whole lot about. an endless parade of random encounters.
i don't know what to do from here really. i oscillate between feeling like i have a big support network and feeling like i have nobody. i don't know if a new website fixes it — there are already prominent posters here that have had A Problem with me before. will they still have a problem if they see me now? should i try to make only mundane posts so as to stay off their radar? do i keep my head down for the rest of my life?
maybe reposting was a mistake. sometimes i miss livejournal






