Thread by @QuinnyPig

Over the weekend I somehow hit 80K followers on this site, which is just wild to me. Five years ago I started with something like 2K, and that had taken me seven years to scrape together.

Some things I have learned along the way as the audience has grown.

There were never any real "giant surges" that led to gaining 10K followers in a week or anything like that. It was about consistently being me.

My relationship with the site has changed as well. I used to be much likelier to put any thought that crossed my mind onto Twitter.

There are inflections that come with a larger audience. There's remarkably little I can tweet these days that SOMEONE won't take issue with.

I used to not understand why people would grow a Twitter account to 60K-70K followers and then just... stop tweeting.

I think I understand better now. You stop being "a person" and start being "a persona" instead.

There's a weird kind of loneliness in popularity. Everyone knows who you are, vanishingly few people know *who you are*, if that makes sense.

As the audience grows, your capacity to do harm increases. "I say something ill-considered to 20 people" isn't great; "I say the same thing to an audience that's 4x the population of the town I grew up within" is quite another.

Something I always try to remember as well is that as someone who's demographically wildly over-represented, I get grief orders of magnitude less than marginalized folks do.

Twitter also flat out doesn't do nuance. It has remarkably little patience for things that don't fit neatly into 280 characters.

The world is *complicated!* Most things don't lend themselves to simple analysis like that.

One of the weird parts about this situation is that it's completely unsympathetic to folks who haven't gone through it themselves. "Oh, everyone knows who you are and engages with you constantly? MUST BE NICE!"

Sometimes. But not always.

Having an AUDIENCE here is simultaneously both more and less useful than you'd think.

I've never directly monetized it (nor do I plan to), but it's definitely led to a variety of business opportunities over the years.

I wouldn't say it's made me a happier person.

But what it has done is given me the chance to meet people that I've admired from a distance for a while. It's opened the door for new coworkers, experiences, and points of view. It's diversified aspects of my life in fascinating ways.

And somehow, despite some very hot takes over the years?

I've still gone a decade on this platform without becoming Today's Main Character.

All things considered, I'll take it.