I joined Twitter nearly eight years ago. mostly to see what other people were saying.
The idea of having just 140 characters — the original Twitter limit — to make a point seemed to me another step down the road to illiteracy. I remember there was a short-lived site — the name doesn’t come to mind — that didn’t allow posts of less than 1,400 characters. That was kind of cute.
I didn’t post on Twitter all that frequently, and my following stood around 175, more or less.
Twitter gained some credibility with me a few years back when they changed the limit of characters from 140 to 280, making it easier to complete a thought without a series of tweets.
One thing that got me more involved was when someone I was not only following on the Web but making occasional financial contributions to, basically switched to Twitter. Jim Wright’s website Stonekettle Station is probably the most intelligent, insightful site I know, and it has been the most compelling since Joe Bageant died.
Joe Bageant?
Try and keep up. Bageant, who died 10 years ago, wrote one of the most insightful books of the generation about why Democrats have so much trouble appealing to working class, blue-collar voters. He’s the writer who posited the idea of the American Hologram, basically saying that all the talk about the American Dream has become an illusion.
Wright is different, mostly looking at things from the perspective of a career military man who is not a conservative or a racist.
His essays are on the long side, but many of them have left me wanting even more when I reach the end.
Sadly, he hasn’t posted an essay on the web in 6 1/2 months. He’s active on Twitter and Facebook, and I became more active on Twitter to see what he was saying.
I started replying and retweeting both him and others, and I was making my own tweets more frequently. The number of people following me started growing, but not very much. Then I realized the secret. Nearly everyone on Twitter who isn’t famous and doesn’t have millions of people following them wants more followers.
In fact, many of them promise that if you follow them, they will follow you back.
So I started following as many people as I could. My total of 175 doubled, then triple and kept growing. Along the way I got a three-day suspension for following too many people. I still don’t quite understand why, although it had something to do with making sure I wasn’t a bot.
Yesterday I reached a thousand followers.
Not too bad, and as I write this I have actually reached 1,060. More and more people are seeing my posts, and every day I get a few followers from people I didn’t follow first.
Of course I follow them back as soon as I see them.
I’m strictly small potatoes at this point. Stonekettle has 179,000 followers, author Patricia Cornwell has 1.2 million and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich has 1.3 million. Donald Trump had something like 65-70 million followers, although a good number of those were bots.
Compared to that, my 1,063 (up three more) is like an ant under their feet.
Still, I’ve got six times as many followers as I did three weeks ago.
Watch us as we grow.