A Post About Thanksgiving That No Other Liberal Is Going To Write

Read to the end for an unrelated story about Bette Midler lol.

Happy Thanksgiving!

As you probably know, my Twitter account is somewhat controversial. A lot of people hate my tweets. It initially helped my career—by virtue of networking—but then became a huge problem for my career, then ultimately destroyed it. It is why I am on substack and don’t have a staff job at a publication.

This is something that people should keep in mind as they read the words to come. I am not saying that there isn’t a cost to my philosophy of Twitter. There is. I make today about as much as I made 9 years ago. I make $70k less than I did in 2020.

But nevertheless, I am the one who does social media right. Too many people do it wrong.

My philosophy of Twitter is simple: it should be an honest advertisement for what I am like in real life. I’m very proud of the fact that that is true for me. A lot of people hate my tweets, and that’s fine because they would probably hate me in person. A lot of people like my tweets, and that’s even better because it means we would probably get along in real life.

If you have a thought that you would share in person at a party to casual acquaintances, and you have the time and cell reception, you should share it online. Don’t worry about it. Just go. Chase it down a hole. Riff in public and evolve in public. Do not worry about the fact that some of these thoughts will be stupid because everyone has stupid thoughts.

(If you have evil thoughts—like, say Osama bin Laden is good—you probably shouldn’t share them for your own career, but I think the world is better if you share them. At least we know! People who have strong filters and only share what they think “the room wants” could be thinking anything! They could be cannibals. They could be witches. Hate me or love me, but I have no thoughts that I think are Too Hot For Twitter. My worst thoughts are out there.)

There was a time a decade ago when I was a social media manager when the worst thing a social media account could do in terms of audience development was sound affected. Social media is conversational. You want to sound natural. Everyone basically figured this out. But now, affectation diseases social media in a different way: people aren’t real. I don’t mean in a literal sense. They aren’t bots. But they don’t just use it as a chat room. They are scared to do that because they’ll get in trouble. Or they don’t do it because they think their tweets are little missiles in a political fight and they need to walk the line. Or they don’t do it because they are influencers and they think of it like a business.

Fine. It’s a free country and I support your right to do those things. But that is one of the main reasons why social media is bad now. (It’s not the only one.) Now, for the most part, a majority of people really self-censor, leaving a bunch of this free-wheeling extemporaneous real estate to anonymous accounts that are just hateful trolls. There are still a lot—millions—of people like me, but now it’s such a minority approach that people treat my Twitter account like a rare bird because it is prominent, nominally reputable,  and still totally unpredictable and random. But people are totally unpredictable and random. If my Twitter account were anything else, it would be fake.

People who self-censor to that extent on a platform might be doing the smart thing in terms of their reputations or their career prospects, but they’re boring.

Podcasts have largely taken the “let’s just shoot the shit and see where it goes” energy. But while I like podcasts, my favored medium is text. And short text bursts like Twitter are perfect for my brain.

For some insane reason, I actually self-censor on Substack much more than Twitter, even though the audiences are different in size and nature, such that it would be smarter to have that go the other way. It’s just muscle memory, I suppose.

On Substack, I feel a bit like, “Well, this is publishing A Piece™. On Twitter, they’re just tweets.” This is dumb and something that I am constantly yelling at myself about.

More people should use Twitter like me, and I should use Substack more like the way I use Twitter.

In the interest of practicing what you preach, I will now share some unhinged thoughts an editor would never let me publish.