Thread by @AlexandraErin

Hey, folks, real quick, here's a few things to consider.

I've got 38,000 people following me and my threads frequently go viral before millions of people. In order to keep Twitter manageable, I almost always have my notifications filtered to "only people I follow".

If I didn't take this step... I still wouldn't see most replies to me, because I'd get so many notifications and I wouldn't have time to go through them all.

But with it? I really don't see most replies to me. I check replies on my threads sometimes, but with no rhyme or reason.

I'm not the first person to make a stat block for a swarm of pigs in the last 24 hours. I'll straight-up say that I made mine because I saw so many of them... and I thought that they missed a few key points, but rather than criticizing someone else's design choices, I made my own

The main difference is that it felt like most people were treating the swarm of hogs as if it were a single large hog, making one attack per round and charging at single targets.

Good enough for a joke, but didn't really capture the absolute chaos of the premise.

And again, I'm not saying this to criticize the other efforts (mine, as I noted, fails some of important if unofficial design benchmarks) but to explain why I felt mine added something new, and thus was worth adding to the mix.

Because I've been accused of joke stealing.

I'm the sort of person who, before she makes a hogs georg joke, does a Twitter search to see if someone else has hit it. Because I take my craft seriously.

But this doesn't mean the next 30-50 people who make a hogs georg joke stole it from the first one.

It's an obvious idea.

And if we're honest, one of the reasons memetic mash-ups work is that multiple people look at the set-up and SEE that it's crying out for a Spiders Georg snowclone or a D&D monster statblock or whatever.

It's hitting buttons that the whole audience shares. That's why it works.

I'm proud of my work (yes, even the jokes, and in fact, especially the jokes) and I'm also critical of my work. I look at my statblock and the subject/verb disagreement in one of the abilities jumps out at me, plus I lament that it's missing some features a CR 12 legendary needs.

And to be honest, I care less that some rando accused me of stealing a joke than I care about the idea that I should have seen one response on a thread made at 30-50 minutes past midnight, when I was probably playing video games like a normal person.

Lamenting that I didn't even Like the tweet you QTed at me before I "stole" it makes me feel like you only QTed it towards my attention because you thought I would give you attention, not because you thought I might enjoy seeing it.

I absolutely do RT funny riffs that people reply to me with, if I see them. But I don't see all of them. And it's not reasonable to expect that I will.

If I had notifications set the way I did when I had 380 or 3,800 followers, my phone would be constantly dying and so would I.

Sorry you thought I stole your chance for Twitter viral fame but that's not how it works.

Only two reasons to be mad when somebody on Twitter makes the same joke as you:

1. They literally copy and paste yours.
2. They're replying to your joke tweet with the same joke, in a way that makes it clear they don't understand you already made the joke.