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I think I can sincerely describe myself as a twitter "hacker", because the way I use this platform/product at this point is extremely different than what the product is optimized/designed for hacker as in, person who looks for useful workarounds, glitches, bugs
it is extremely cool that I could go to any of these places in the world and have people who would totally hang out with me, just some guy, typing nonsense into his phone https://t.co/b18NqsC3zl
a mini-game I play on twitter to amuse myself is to look out for people with repeated initials I have 150 people in this list https://t.co/2PLoH9f8yC still missing: FF, QQ, UU, XX, YY
a cool thing to do once you have 5k+ followers is to 1. look for cool people "out of your league" 2. go through their following list 3. see which of these people are *already* following you 4. follow those people back 5. get on (1)'s radar Twitter does *not* help you with this
if you have 5,000 followers, you almost definitely have cool followers that you don't know are cool twitter does not help you figure out who these people are, you have to figure it out yourself you might have like, NASA scientists following you and not realize it
let's frame it like this 1.3% of the people elon musk follows... follow me this is extremely interesting information!!! but twitter doesn't surface this to me when i'm on elon's profile. it's much more interesting that "who else follows elon" (spoiler: it's 1 guy, pmarca)
suppose i want to get to know, say, hasan minaj. cool guy. we'd have a lot to talk about. he's following 1,010 people. what can twitter tell me? oh, 40 of the people I follow, are following him. useless info what I want to know is, who is HE following... that's following ME https://t.co/IR0knd2lPw
There is one person!! 1 out of 1,010 people that Hasan follows, follows me. Ie that person could theoretically introduce me to him. Twitter does not tell me who this person is. I have to scroll through all 1,000+ people and do cmd+f and "follows you" https://t.co/RcvezRqLCf
ha, that means our social networks don't overlap at all. you're based in... Lagos? I do think I have some followers from there too. that's another potentially useful and interesting piece of information that twitter has but does not easily surface https://t.co/1GaHFBQkQc
ie if you could find out "which of visa's followers are based in lagos", you could hit them up, maybe hang out with them IRL, and then they could introduce you to me (or you can just tweet me directly lol, but you see how it would be a useful thing to be able to do)
4 of the 1,300+ people AOC follows, follow me how cool is that only way I know to find out via twitter itself is to scroll through all 1,300+ and cmd+f "follows you" ... through this I *just* learned I have a US Senator who follows me (out of 1,900) with their personal acct https://t.co/rKhLL359DH
on twitter web, you can click on a person's location, then filter by people you're following to see who else is in that location https://t.co/ptXqTTsfx0
again, twitter doesn't seem to appreciate/care how valuable it would be if people could have these features for their *followers* list rather than *following* list. It would allow you to seriously leverage the social capital that you've built. Go to any city and know who to meet