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I started putting this together because it seemed like Twitter had a non-trivial chance of dying. If I\u2019m being honest a part of me was trying to capitalize on that hype, sort of like one of those snack vendors who shows up at protests. Hey, opportunity is opportunity. I gotta eat too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s always tempting for me to start at the start but the start is often the worst place to start.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I got my first Twitter account in October 2008, when I was still a teenager living with my parents, using the shared home PC, which I think was running Windows XP at the time. I didn\u2019t get my first smartphone until 2013 (a Samsung Galaxy Note 2).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2731<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For a few years, around 2012\u20132015 or so, Quora was my favorite site on the Internet. It would be the first site that I\u2019d check in the morning every day. I\u2019d get to see all sorts of interesting people from all over the world writing really thoughtful answers to questions. I relished in the opportunity to participate in that too, and I found to my delight that people liked my answers as well. I made some friends \u2013 an emergency room nurse, a theatre director with a resplendent appreciation of Shakespeare, a language teacher, a soldier who wrote delightful tactical analysis of fantasy situations, a musicologist\u2026 it was a delightful scene. But nothing lasts forever. Eventually Quora began to get diluted with tedious low-effort content, marketing spam\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2731<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I never really set out to be a \u201cTwitter thread power user\u201d or whatever you wanna call it. Twitter used to be a sort of background app for me<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2731 <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I tweeted earlier, \u201cvaguely kinda wishing i had someone to really discuss deep twitter game with the way some people discuss chess\u201d \u2013 and then I figured that this is as good a prompt as any to start writing an essay about<\/em> twitter. (I\u2019m choosing not to capitalize it, and I\u2019m kind of considering being irreverent with capitalization in general throughout this essay, the way i tend to be when I write tweets. again, i\u2019m still figuring out the particular tonality of this substack essay medium\u2026)<\/p>\n\n\n\n