Twitter full circle

Coming full circle on my Twitter approach lately.

I used to schedule my tweets a few weeks ahead. And I’ll sit down on Monday to write them all out in 1-2h. Just like any good content creator guru would advise. But since around the start of the year or thereabouts, after doing it for about 1-2 years, I got tired of it. It felt ‘off’. It didn’t align inwardly, didn’t feel congruent to how I was portraying myself on Twitter versus how I truly felt on my indie journey. It felt forced, artificial. Even inauthentic sometimes. I was just “building an audience”, not really building in public. I’ve now stopped doing that altogether, and instead just tweeted whatever I’m doing or thinking for the day. I’m having so much more fun chatting with other indie peers right now. I think engagement rate is better too. Or at least, the kind of engagement that I enjoy. And since the demise of all the Twitter tools I used to use, I’m even starting to consider not using any tool at all to auto-retweet my tweets, and instead just tweeting directly on the Twitter desktop app.

And I’m not alone. Just from this tweet by Jakob and the replies alone, I can confirm the shift in approach in many of the friends I interact with on Twitter:

I’ve made the executive decision to start posting whatever whenever I feel like it. No strategy, no scheduling. Just raw thoughts. Let’s make Twitter fun again. – @jakobgreenfeld

I wonder what brought about this sea change. Maybe it’s just fatigue at all the clickbait noise created by threadbois. All those templated tweets about"web3", “NFTs” and then now “ChatGPT”. Or accounts weaponizing outrage for engagement.

Maybe with organic reach on Twitter being nerfed, people finally got cold-turkeyed from the dopamine addiction for followers and likes, and pivoted to what Twitter was originally for all along – connecting for fun, with cool people doing cool things.

For me, it’s observing folks like @levelsio, @dannypostmaa and @tdinh_me do it. They don’t retweet or seem to use Twitter scheduling tools. They just build cool stuff and tweet. The engagement will take care of itself if you’re doing interesting things. In fact, Tony himself built a Twitter tool but he doesn’t schedule anything at all:

Highly recommend. Fun fact: even though I built @blackmagic_so, I have never used it (or any other app) to schedule my tweets 😂 – @tdinh_me

Kinda reminds of of how drug dealers “don’t get high off their own supply”, but in a good way haha. But seriously though… seeing how they do it reminded me of my indie hacking roots, why I joined Twitter in the first place, why I want to build in public. Before I learned about building an audience, before the Twitter gurus spammed our timelines with “10 tips to get to 10k followers in 1 month”.

I want to get back to that.

Full circle.