I started putting this together because it seemed like Twitter had a non-trivial chance of dying. If I’m 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.

It’s always tempting for me to start at the start but the start is often the worst place to start.

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’t get my first smartphone until 2013 (a Samsung Galaxy Note 2).

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For a few years, around 2012–2015 or so, Quora was my favorite site on the Internet. It would be the first site that I’d check in the morning every day. I’d 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 – 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… it was a delightful scene. But nothing lasts forever. Eventually Quora began to get diluted with tedious low-effort content, marketing spam…

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I never really set out to be a “Twitter thread power user” or whatever you wanna call it. Twitter used to be a sort of background app for me

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I tweeted earlier, “vaguely kinda wishing i had someone to really discuss deep twitter game with the way some people discuss chess” – and then I figured that this is as good a prompt as any to start writing an essay about twitter. (I’m choosing not to capitalize it, and I’m kind of considering being irreverent with capitalization in general throughout this essay, the way i tend to be when I write tweets. again, i’m still figuring out the particular tonality of this substack essay medium…)

I’ve written a lot about twitter over the years, most of it on twitter. My “twitter rpg guide” from 2019 is pretty popular. you can read it on twitter or in a blogpost form.