Thread by @QuinnyPig

I believe I owe the Twitter a thread on my "Rules of Shitposting." This is that thread.

It's in our Corporate Docs at the Duckbill Group under the more prosaic headline "Our Marketing Beliefs & Rules."

There are seven of them, and were collected by @mike_julian based upon the things I've said and we've ruminated upon.

Rule 1: Consent is required.

"The world is full of marketers and advertisers foisting things upon people without their consent. We don’t want to do that. Our marketing should always require consent."

I can't stress how important this is. The newsletter is confirmed opt-in.

Another example: I built a custom anonymizing link tracker for @lastweekinaws that tells me how many folks in aggregate clicked a link I sent out, but not who clicked it. I don't know, nor do I want to.

I use this data to inform periodic "best of" posts.

Fundamentally, I should be able to send you every bit of information I have on you / your behavior, and it should be obvious to you that I have it. "I gave you my email to send me newsletters, and you kept it" style.

Rule 2: Humor is necessary.

The entire cloud industry takes itself way too damned seriously. Corporate-speak is tried and true, and billion dollar companies have been built on it, but that's not us and we're not that.

For god's sake, our mascot is a platypus with an attitude.

Rule 3: Punch up, never down.

If the use of humor needs a target, punch up. Trillion dollar companies? Acceptable targets! The people who work there are very much not.

As a general rule, you should try to avoid doing it at all. It's *exceptionally* hard to do well, and easy to get wrong. I've spent a very long time honing how I do it. Understand that the failure mode here isn't "the joke bombs" but "people think you're a giant asshole."

Example! There's a Twitter account that parodies @ajassy that people periodically ask me if I run. I absolutely do not; it's actively mean. That's neither who I am, nor who I want to be.

Even if you actively despise someone, they have friends and family who love them and will be hurt on their behalf.

The corollary to this rule is that Larry Ellison (Oracle Co-Founder and notable asshole) has nobody who likes him, because he isn't people. He's the exception!

Other than Larry Ellison, if you go after someone personally it's incredibly likely that you're going to be a complete jerk who's shitting on someone personally and looking obnoxious unless they're basically a senator.

The midpoint of the list!

Rule 4: The competition doesn't matter.

First, our competition isn't at all who most people would suspect it is, but that's almost entirely irrelevant.

Our focus is and has to be our readers and our clients. Explaining what Duckbill is by explaining another company is a terrible way to explain what we do, anyway. We need to tell *our* story, not someone else's.

If you need an "enemy" (as one always does; every story needs a villain) it's the customer's pain, not the competition.

The default position towards competitors is to ignore them. It's a big world; there's plenty for everyone.

Rule 5: Trust is earned over years and lost in a second

My newsletter @LastWeekinAWS is implicitly understood to be written by me personally. The Duckbill Group is less closely tied to me, but @mike_julian and I are still the Voices of the Company.

As a result, absolutely everything we publish has an implicit "Love, Corey & Mike" slapped at the end of it. Am I going to regret or wince at what's going out above a closing like that? If so, we're not sending it.

I think @alexhillman nailed it when he wrote “Audience-building should really just be called ‘earning trust at scale’.”

That trust can be lost, and then you're hosed; you can't come back from that effectively.

Rule 6: Help our customers be awesome.

As funny as I (think I) am, people pay us because we solve a problem for them--be it a big AWS bill or getting their product/service visibility.

This one is "squishy," but let me give an example.

Every week I put out a blog post at LastWeekinAWS.com. Every week I have a target persona in mind for the post, and the goal of that post is to help them solve a problem. Some weeks it's "understanding a cloud thing." Other times it's "discovering something to help."

That persona is never "me," and that problem is never "people haven't heard enough about me lately."

It's nuanced, but customers care about their problems, not their vendors. That's okay.

Rule 7: Protect subscriber information

Other than "how much a given company spends on @awscloud" or "our employees' personal information" there's nothing we treat with more reverence / care.

Subscriber information should always be protected. Subscriber privacy matters. If we’re on the fence about whether we’ve protected something adequately, chances are the answer is no.

Our response to the periodic prospective sponsor request "may we embed a tracking pixel in the podcast RSS feed?" is a very carefully and politely worded "no the fuck you may not."

And those in a nutshell are the Rules of Shitposting / Marketing here.

"Punch up, not down" is the hardest one just because it's so nuanced. Sometimes I get it wrong. When I find out, I'm quick to apologize--and I don't make the same mistake twice.

If someone reads something I've put out and feels shitty as a result, I've failed. When I find out that it happened I'm horrified. If I can't make a joke without crapping on individuals, it's time to find a better joke.

I will now field questions from the audience.

I really don't think most of us are quite that twisted.

https://twitter.com/killedbygoogle/status/1360079765101834241?s=20

I think we've all sent bad tweets. It turns out "when you get it wrong, apologize sincerely and don't do it again" is a viable recovery strategy.

I have a group of people I run things past sometimes. Increasingly "if I have to ask them, don't send it."

https://twitter.com/SimpsonsOps/status/1360081249839116290?s=20

Another question has come in! "Larry's the exception, but what about Jeff Bezos?" Sure, and Larry Page and Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg and so on and so on--and where does it end?

Reducing to "billionaires bad" plays well and speaks to a societal ill--but then what?

It doesn't actually SOLVE anything, and in the specific case of Jeff Bezos, suddenly I'd be dunking personally on the founder of the company I spend a lot of time speaking to and working with. It would make those interactions very, very difficult.

What would it gain me?

I think all seven are violated constantly by basically the entire industry. If they weren't they wouldn't warrant inclusion.

"Talk about your products and services so as to entice people to buy them" need not be said, y'know?

https://twitter.com/kale/status/1360082474840199168?s=20

This tweet is the answer to the unasked question "Why do I do threads like this from time to time."

I used to get in-person feedback of "wow, you're not an asshole after all." It didn't feel good. My shitposting had to improve.

https://twitter.com/deconstructized/status/1360085424216047616