Twitter for Free Learners
Let's make learning in public our New Year's resolution
I got interested in Twitter back in 2020 by a desire to find people posting about spaced repetition and tools for thought. My experiences in the SuperMemo.Wiki Discord channel showed me that being part a group obsessively interested in exploring a specific topic creates a great environment for developing new ideas.
Despite having a pretty low opinion of social media in general, I decided to do an experiment - I would start using Twitter to exchange ideas with people in the spaced repetition community and see where it led. In less than 6 months on the platform I'd met close friends and found a job in a niche exactly aligned to my interests.
Recently I fell out of the habit of posting and interacting with people online and I realised it quite negatively impacted my life, because there’s nowhere quite like the internet to find other weirdos with niche interests that overlap with your own. Where else could I find geeks who’ll spend months deliberating the intricacies of flashcard formulation with me?
I hope this short article motivates us both to inject ourselves back into the concept network that is Twitter.
Democratisation of Attention
You may have no reputation and no followers. You might be completely anonymous. All you need is ideas, passions and insights! Twitter is great because it democratises attention: it's possible to have your tweets spread far and wide based purely on their content, rather than how many followers you have.
Quite early on in my Twitter experiment someone retweeted a video I made called There is No Good Learning Without Pleasure which started to circulate it amongst the so-called "critical rationalist" community (which I had never heard of). Suddenly out of nowhere it got retweeted by David Deutsch.
It shocked me how rapidly things can spread between networks of communities you have never heard of. David’s retweet drew a bunch of attention to the video, and since it included an advertisement for a Discord event I was running on the weekend, the event attracted 30+ people I’d never met to come and talk about my video!
Stepping Stone Collection
Discussing ideas with people on Twitter can create opportunities and open doors for you. I found my first job through Twitter as a self-taught engineer at a company that's precisely aligned to my interests by direct messaging one of the founders. I could not have found that opportunity anywhere else. And it was 10x easier to get noticed because my expertise was evident publicly from my Twitter posts and YouTube.
Squeezing yourself into the attention cycle can create all kinds of weird opportunities, help you make friends with people who share the same niche interests and can help you develop your ideas. There are non-linear payoffs from small, effortless tweets and replies.
Read A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox by Henrik which beautifully articulates this point.
Posting into the Void
If you post quality stuff people will eventually take notice. Even if they don't, you are still building up a "portfolio" of sorts that people can browse to understand who you are, what you are interested in and what you have expertise in. I found making videos and sharing them in multiple places, eg. Discord, on some of the SRS-related subreddits and Twitter to be a good way to find people interested in chatting. You might feel uncomfortable about promoting your writing or videos, but over time you realise that as long as it's high quality, people want to find your stuff.
One thing to bear in mind is that markets provide brutally honest feedback. If you create a pill that can cure cancer, you won't have any trouble selling it. In an attention market like Twitter, if you have something interesting to share people will read and retweet it. But if you create a product which has no value and doesn't solve a problem, you'll struggle to find a customer. And if you share ideas and posts no one finds interesting, expect to be met with silence.
This sounds very negative but it's actually a cause for optimism - isn't it better to receive real feedback from actual people and realise that you can improve the clarity and articulation of your ideas?
In school, you can get an A on an assignment which no one in the real world will ever read or derive value from. If you forced someone to read it they'd tell you it's valueless. Markets expose you to real people facing real financial and time constraints which make them 10,000x more discerning judges of value than someone who is paid to grade whatever you wrote.
How to Get Started
If you are interested in free learning, spaced repetition, incremental reading or tools for thought, sign up for Twitter and post an idea, summarise an article or share some video clips. Send your Tweets to me or tag me, I’m always interested in finding more people interested in these ideas.