Reflections on 100,000 Twitter Followers

I just reached a very significant milestone on Twitter: I now have over 100,000 followers on that platform. According to one social media nomenclature that I came across a while back, I am no longer a “micro” celebrity. This milestone has been a long way coming. I still remember clearly when I reached 10,000 followers on my birthday, a few years ago. The growth, however, has been exponential for the past few years, and barring some unforeseen catastrophic event (already a possibility these days, especially with Twitter), I expect it to continue in the months and years ahead.

As I have mentioned it often, I never really expected to grow this much on social media, and especially not on Twitter. When I first started tweeting years ago, Twitter was my “junk file” social network. I just posted random stuff here, mostly links to articles and other content that I came across online, as well as links to my tech reviews that I was into back in those days. When I started Kaggling, I would regularly post those silly updates whenever I’d move up on the leaderboard. (Those were fun. Still miss doing them.) But as my Kaggle reputation grew, so did my follower count, and eventually I started getting more and more followers who actually cared abut what I posted. Which induced me to post more meaningful content. Which brought in more meaningful followers. And thus the virtuous circle commenced. At some point my tweeting became more deliberate, and I started putting more thought into what - and when - I tweet. I was also forced to rethink why am I doing all of this and what do I aim to get out out of it. And here are a few of those thoughts, in no particular order.

1. I tweet because it’s fun. That’s my ultimate motivation, overarching everything else. You can really only do something day in day out for years because you genuinely enjoy it. What do I enjoy about tweeting? I enjoy making people laugh. I enjoy sharing interesting news and stories that I came across. I enjoy putting in words various thoughts that come to my mind. I enjoy interacting with interesting people, and learning from them. I enjoy just socializing.

2. I find that Twitter format really suits my own preferred way of expressing myself. Short tweets really force you to distill your thoughts to their core essence. It’s like designing an elegant and effective tool.

3. Twitter format is, IMHO, is especially well suited for the world of Tech, and even more so for the world of AI these days. In this world things move quickly, at a breakneck speed sometimes. Putting a lot of effort into a long post that may be dated the moment it comes out feels like an unnecessary, even futile, endeavor.

4. Tweeting is a good way of creating content for busy people with a lot of other obligations, especially if you want to be consistent about it. I do have a full time job, and we homeschool our kids. So not much time left for more in-depth content creation. Tweeting doesn’t take that much time. A thought pops into my head, and in an instant it’s a tweet. Done.

5. No, I actually do not tweet all the time. Most of my tweets are pre scheduled. I use variety of apps and services to schedule my tweets. My favorite is chime.io - it’s simple, straightforward to use, with all that I really need on a daily basis. It also enables you to post your tweets with a maximum impact based on the time of day.

6. For successful tweeting, consistency is the key. Another reason to schedule your tweets in advance.

7. I still post many spontaneous in-the-moment tweets. Oftentimes events move really quickly, and I want to say something that’s timely and relevant.

8. Many of the tactics that I employ with my tweeting I’ve learned from others. There are too many of the influences to list them all here (and I am really bad with names, so I would have to go and look them all up, which would ruin the spontaneity of this piece.) Nonetheless, the old adage about standing on the shoulders of giants certainly applies in this context. So I want to thank you all, and I hope that you know that your influence, inspiration and advice has really helped me get to this point.

9. Another thing that I absolutely love about Twitter is that here you have access to almost anyone. You can, and people often do, interact with actual celebrities and important people. This is an incredibly democratizing platform, and I really hope that it stays that way.

10. I enjoy tweeting, because most of the days it’s the only regular social interaction that I have with people in my field. I work remotely, I live in a small town in Indiana, thousands of miles away from the nearest big tech hubs. Not much going on here tech wise. All other opportunities for socialization are also extremely limited. I’d go bananas if I didn’t have Twitter.

11. Twitter encourages spontaneity. Even though I am more deliberate about tweeting these days, I still mostly follow my own gut instincts when it comes to what kind of content do I post. Do I want to be a Machine Learning guru? Post career advice? Life hacks? Dank memes? Dad jokes? Breaking news? Why not all! I really want my tweets to be a good reflection of me personally, and don’t want to be pigeonholed into any particular category.

12. Which leads me to the following point: if you don’t like the way I run my Twitter account, you really, really, really don’t need to follow me. Or read my tweets. Unfollow. Mute. Block. I’m fine with that. There are plenty more accounts on Twitter. It’s an almost unlimited smorgasbords of personalities and content.

13. XGBoost.

14. Humor. Ah yes, humor. It’s a big part of what my tweets are about these days. I like humor. A lot. And I really like people who like humor. A lot. Besides being fun, I believe that humor is a great low-key selection tool. No, you don’t have to enjoy my jokes, or find most of them particularly funny. But if you are irritated by my humor, you and I will probably not get along. Period. Personally, professionally, name it. It’s best to part ways and leave each other alone.

15. Every professional field has its own culture. Even those that are superficially as stale, dour, and boring as tech. Culture arises spontaneously, but it can be cultivated and directed. That, over the years, has become one of the motivators for my posts. I enjoy tapping into the wellsprings of the tech culture, finding overarching insights and deeper truths that are hidden beneath the mechanical exterior. Refining those insights and truths is a profoundly rewarding experience, and I hope that my tweets can add to that cultural repository. Tech is still fundamentally a very human endeavor, and will likely remain so for some time, even after the machines take over everything that machines can. That’s when that culture may still prevail, and give us a reason to endure.