Hard posts vs. soft posts
I was thinking about microblogging today, as one does. I’m still on Twitter1, split between two accounts, one public and one private. I post nice pictures and stuff I make on the public one, and I drift between posting random passing thoughts to the public one or the private one. In the last year or so I’ve been trying to post more freely, with less revision or hesitation, and definitely made progress, but sometimes I’m still averse to putting low-quality thoughts (“i can’t focus” “i cut my bangs” “listen to this song”) on the public account. Maybe I feel like it dilutes it, and then the algorithm won’t serve my better posts that I actually want people to see. Maybe I don’t want everyone to see, only my closer friends, if I’m talking about something serious or sad or personal.
Whatever the reason, it doesn’t really feel right. I feel like I should stick to one or the other. But then I lose the showcase, or I lose the privacy. I’ve also felt like I should get off of Twitter completely. I probably won’t move to Bluesky or Fediverse, since my friends aren’t there. But I like microblogging. I’m addicted, most likely, to sharing random thoughts and knowing my friends read them, thought about them, maybe related, maybe enjoyed, maybe appreciated. It’s probably unhealthy, but I can at least stop it from sending me notifications and try to stop myself from checking it too much. Random posts sometimes lead to conversations and over time, new friends. I also want somewhere to share stuff I’m more proud of, like photos or software, and Twitter is where I do that now.
I had the thought today that if I got off Twitter, everyone would forget I exist. An exaggeration, but lots of people I interact with on Twitter I don’t message directly. I want people to hear my thoughts, but I don’t want to send them directly to all my friends. Firstly because I don’t want to type the same things out again, and secondly because there’s too many thoughts to have a conversation with everyone about each one. I’d rather have different unique conversations with people. For higher effort stuff, I don’t have it in me to send it to everyone and tell them to look at it. I want people to see and engage on their own terms.
But maybe the problem is that these are two different modalities. I’m reminded of this video by Rue Yi on TikTok (transcript below), sent to me by a friend a few weeks ago, which uses the terms “hard posts” and “soft posts”. Hard posts are the showcase, higher effort, longer lasting. Soft posts are ephemeral, like Instagram stories or tweets. I think this maps pretty well to my dilemma described above.
So maybe to solve my problem I need to shuffle things around. This post is obviously not in the same category as my previous two blog posts (maybe I’ll add tags or something later). Writing a blog post like that feels very high stakes and permanent. I feel like I need to research and revise and make it flawless. But I don’t think every post needs to be like that. This is a thought I want more fleshed out and lasting than a couple tweets. It’s in between technical writing and random microblog post, but it can live here for now.
I think I need to move the showcase aspect of my public Twitter somewhere else too. I’ve wanted to put photos on my website, but I haven’t yet2. At the same time, I feel like adding stuff to my website is like screaming into the void or maybe leaving a message in a bottle. Someone might see it eventually, but I don’t log traffic, so unless they message me about it, there’s not the same acknowledgement of a like on a microblogging site. There’s this idea of Publish on your own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere, or POSSE, where I upload photos or posts like this to my site then post the link to microblog feeds. It’s a little clumsy, but it could work. At the same time, I’m reminded of a post I read a while ago, blogs rot. wikis wait. Blog posts do have a tendency to decay. With the technical ones, I try to build them to last at least, but something like this isn’t something that’ll hold up forever. The proposed alternative is wikis/digital gardens. I’ve tried once or twice, but the format didn’t really click for me (yet). I think building out different pages for different showcases or collections of thoughts that grow over time sort of has the same effect though. I’ll be aiming for something in the middle of storefront/Twitter feed/garden.
With that done, I think I can go back to posting random thoughts on my public Twitter, and reserve my private for the most personal things. Maybe I can stop microblogging all together, if I move around more of my social interaction. I want to talk directly to people more, and I want to try to use chats and forums and longer-form writing more. I need to see these things as lower stakes. I think they’re probably healthier and more fulfilling patterns than scrolling the feed.
Zooming out a little, I’ve been trying to emphasize for myself that computers should be tools for living. Software should assist, augment, ennoble. More to be said on that, but I haven’t thought it all through yet. I think the Rue Yi video is pretty close to what I’ve been thinking recently about the purpose of social media. I’ve transcribed the video below, in case you don’t watch short form video. Otherwise, thanks for reading! See you next time.
Rue Yi on hard posts and soft posts
Transcibed from TikTok:
I feel like a lot of people aren’t using social media to its fullest potential.
Posting online has never really been about followers, or virality, or gaining a certain number of this or that. Those all serve the larger goal of meeting people, because people are behind the posts that are online. And if you think someone’s posts are interesting, it’s very likely that they themselves are also interesting people.
And because this is a public arena, the way you do this is by casting your net very very wide, into the great ocean that is the Internet — the feed — and sweeping it along, and capturing the couple of gems that you come across, that you really admire. And the best way to do that is you have to post yourself. You can’t just be a lurker online. You gotta have an archive of “hard posts” that people can look at. Not just the soft posts, like the Instagram stories.
The concept of hard posting is not original by the way. It was given to me by one of my mutuals by the name of Joey Lim, who is the founder of River. River’s one of those alternative social media apps that have popped up in the last couple of years, in complement or in contrast to the social media megalodons.
We were introduced by Anita Joh, who I traded a leather fish for a leather journal for. She was like, I think you guys should meet. There was this one time I scrolled down his timeline, and I saw a selfie of Kim Kardashian, retweeted, and the caption said, “you can copy the recipe, but the sauce won’t taste the same.” And I knew he was being 100% sincere. So I hop in a call with him, and we talk about a lot of stuff. But I think the thing that really stands out to me is the stuff that’s like, really cliché.
In order to properly disseminate a message to a mass audience, like you do on a platform such as this, you need to be able to tap into some sort of relatability with a mass audience. And that could mean love. Loss. Grief. Celebration. Joy. And all the emotions that make being human human.
They’re the subjects of cliché but they don’t have to be cliché themselves. Sometimes a different perspective is what is needed. Sometimes somebody completely changes the way you think about the world and they don’t even have to do anything. They just have to be themselves.
And isn’t that the point of talking to people on the other side of social media? To gain another perspective?