Overwhelmed by Twitter Popularity

07/08/2014

I did a throwaway tweet about a Lego set I was building the other day, and it went a bit crazy by my standards.

It's mostly died down now, but in a little over three days I gained just short of 80 followers from one tweet. Considering I've been hovering around 740 followers for the last few months, operating something of a one-in-one-out policy, a spike like this is quite weird.

Happily, I signed up to Where Did My Tweet Go? a few days ago, so I was able to see some stats on this anomalous tweet.

wdmtg

View the graph on WDMTG (doesn't work on mobiles, sorry). I guess some private tweeters shared it, which might account for the incongruent numbers.

It's pretty overwhelming to think that half a million people might have seen something I wrote. Even though it's only 3 words that Twitter thinks are Vietnamese and a picture of a Lego booklet.

This has also brought me to a conclusion that I wasn't expecting. I'm not as interested in being Twitter-famous (whatever) as I thought I might be. Getting a tweet seen by a bunch of people at a time was a kick, but it drowned out the rest of Twitter for me. For the whole weekend, there were so many notifications for this tweet, that it suppressed all the responses to anything else.

Now, this is just one tweet that got relatively popular out of 50,000. But if you consider even moderately popular tweeters like Justin Bieber and Katy Perry; they will have no hope whatsoever of being able to establish meaningful communication through all that noise. Everything on Katy Perry's front page has over 1,500 retweets, and that doesn't even count the parasitic quote-tweeting behaviour that will drown out her mention notifications. Whether she has any interest in interacting with her fans on Twitter or not, it's basically futile. And yet people still try to talk to her all the time.

I'm not really sure where this is going, or even if there's any point to any of it that isn't immediately obvious, but it does raise something that's interesting to me, at least. The more popular you are, the cheaper your social interactions seem doomed to be. If you're popular in real life, you have to spread yourself quite thin to be able to accommodate everyone. If you're less/un-popular, you have the potential to cultivate more meaningful relationships with people because there's less plate-spinning.

I thought it might be quite cool to be popular and have tonnes of followers, but it turns out that I'm far happier with fewer interactions with people I might actually get to learn about. Really takes the pressure off so I can get back to writing jokes about my cat's anus.

All of this isn't to say that I don't value new friends, so if you followed me, say hello if you want!

Email me about this