Hey, so, since I am approaching a thousand new followers after a time when my following was pretty flat for a while, I should let you know that I'm a bit of a curmudgeon and I follow my own ideas about things like following and blocking.
To me, Twitter is simple: follow the people whose content you want to see, mute the people whose content you don't want to see, block the people you don't want to see and don't want interacting with you or the people you RT.
These ideas aren't exactly original or uncommon, but there are enough people with other ideas that I still get messages, after my follower count explodes, asking me why I'm not following back, or why I blocked someone "on my side".
For instancE: I just blocked someone for replying to my tweets about the word misogynoir with "But can we agree that polyamory is wrong?"
Because, no. Why? Why would I agree to that? I know the joke you're referencing but I just firmly rejected the principle it relies on.
Because, no. Why? Why would I agree to that? I know the joke you're referencing but I just firmly rejected the principle it relies on.
Another person posted a picture of a shirt with the joke that's referencing on it and that's fine. It's an okay joke. You don't have to follow prescriptivist dogma about affixes to understand the humor of it and laugh at it.
(For those not getting it, "poly" is ultimately from the Greek and "amorous" is from Latin, and there's a school of pedantry that says you can't do this, which is one of the objections leveled against misogynoir as a word.)
I blocked the person because I felt it wasn't the place to make a joke, it wasn't the place to make THAT joke, it was a risky gamble to assume that I'm not polyamorous (I am) and that I am familiar with the joke referenced (I am, but you can't count on a stranger being so).
I will probably lose some of those thousand new followers I've been talking about for pointing out how crotchety I can be, and that's fine. Honestly, every time my follower count goes up, I usually try to shake some of them loose with a giant thread on pop culture minutiae.
And every time I mention that someone goes "Ha jokes on you I just like your feed even better," but that's the point. I'm not trying to make my numbers go up or down just like in general, with random people. I want to be followed by people who want to follow me.
So, you know. Better you find out what that entails early on.
I think of it as avalanche prevention: if loose snow and debris piles up on a slope without ever being dislodged, you risk a giant avalanche. Better to have some small controlled ones from time to time.
I think of it as avalanche prevention: if loose snow and debris piles up on a slope without ever being dislodged, you risk a giant avalanche. Better to have some small controlled ones from time to time.
People who have never seen your politics when your thread about Transformers goes around might be loose snow. People who have never seen your love of Muppets when your politics threads go around might be loose snow.
As somebody who has been there, I will say that when your account goes from hundreds to thousands, and when it hits the 10,000 mark, you might feel an inclination to self-censor and hide parts of yourself for a while.
Better idea? Post all of yourself.
Better idea? Post all of yourself.
Just get all the possible shocks out of the way. Your follower count might roll backwards for a while - ignore it, it'll still wind up higher than you started, basically no matter what you do. The people who JUST followed you are unlikely to feel entitled or hurt before bouncing.
I'm not going to post a giant tweet thread about Muppet vore in the middle of everything that's happening now, so let this serve as my avalanche prevention thread. I'm a human being. I have boundaries. I treat blocking as a tool to manage my experience, and use it casually.
And one last piece of advice, for anyone who likes to joke on here (I love it, personally): always imagine the worst way your joke could be read by a stranger before @-ing a stranger with a joke.
What if I were a polyamorous person who didn't know the reference?
What if I were a polyamorous person who didn't know the reference?
Also, please remember that on social media, a stranger isn't a person you don't know. A stranger is a person who doesn't know you.
And finally, I'm glad that my followers are going up but I hope that every non-Black person who is following me because of my police threads is also following a lot of the Black thinkers and speakers and doers and leaders who are crossing their timelines.
