Thread by @visakanv, Each individual is the steward of their own “personal conversation space”. You [...]

Each individual is the steward of their own “personal conversation space”. You get to decide what you want to talk about, what you want to hear more or less of.

Lots of people seem to underestimate the amount of influence they have over this- maybe bc of implicit social norms

This applies to basically every sphere of one’s life, but let’s focus on twitter

From the beginning, your handle, name, display pic, bio and your tweets all add up to give passers-by an impression of what your “personal conversation space” is

the accounts you follow, even the accounts you’re followed by - everything is a signal that adds to the picture that people create when making sense of what your account is about, what is permitted and what is not.

Different people do have different assumptions and beliefs ofc

An important thing to realize is that every utterance builds the “fictional universe” - fiction meaning imagined, the way nations and money are imagined - of your corpus.

If you’re not enjoying it YOU CAN CHANGE IT

A common “trap” people fall into is that they feel compelled to respond or react to something they do not like.

The challenge is to appreciate that each one of those utterances teaches people that “this is the sort of content this person posts”, and they will reinforce it

I don’t mean that every single individual who runs into you will play your game. It’s people *in aggregate*. People who don’t like your game will leave, unfollow, etc. People who want to play your game will gravitate towards you. It can be very subtle at first

Arguing with someone is playing with them. I’m not saying you should never argue with anyone - but rather, that it is worth being mindful of who and what you’re giving attention and time to, what you’re incentivising

Another common impulse- maybe this is the default & I’m the weird one- is that people get very invested in their existing conversational spaces, & they get quite territorial about it. People get very invested in the drama b/n familiar actors, or actors with familiar affiliations

For me personally I kind of think of this as a failure of imagination. Not always, but pretty often. There’s a sort of systemic illusion where we overrepresent people who speak up and reply etc. (There is a lot of power in replies and people really underestimate this...)

But I mean, just as your replies are v powerful in getting into the mind spaces of others (which is quite an intimate thing!), it makes sense to similarly remind yourself of newcomers.

You might be getting bored of yourself but it’s somebody’s first day encountering you

Everybody can tell jokes, but not everyone can do a standup special for an hour to a paying audience.

Similarly, while everyone has some influence over their personal conversation space, a master at this craft can build entire communities.

A++ masters build nations, religions

(I’m not actually too keen on having a sort of centralised cult around myself, which I think would be unforgivably *boring*. I’d like to see dozens and dozens of master conversationalists creating a diverse set of interesting knowledge graphs. I wanna travel and explore.)

At the core of this is the most agonising thing I know:

1. humanity is better connected than it has ever been, comms-wise

2. despite this, lots of people are incredibly lonely & isolated

it doesn’t have to be this way

but “community leaders” do have to endure “heat” to solve

Everything I do is to find the others.