Viral Swedes

Tue 27 Nov 2018 - Filed under: Not a Journal. | Posted by: Gavin

I think this sentence smashing together two recent news stories is the most-read sentence I’ve written, at least so far. I wrote 2-3 versions in, say a minute, read it out loud, left the full stop/period off on purpose, and fired it off. Closed the twitter tab on Firefox, did some task at work. Checked on it five minutes later and maybe 3 people had liked it and I figured, ok, as per usual I thought that might have been more popular, but I guess not.

I finished up whatever work I was doing on October 25th (besides despairing about the USA and the world, which is an everyday rather than a specific day thing), drove home, and walked over to pick up our kid from school.

After dinner I looked at twitter and that tweet had 1.6k likes, which is something like 10 times more than 99.9% of everything posted and right then and there (after marveling over it and telling Kelly about it) I began to really understand how twitter makes money. Millions of people write on it for . . . free. I don’t support websites that ask writers to write for free and I think Facebook is a sucking deathhole that wants to kill the web and extract money from as many people as possible, but I so enjoy Twitter: I follow people I know, and many more that I don’t, an unwieldy slowly built-up group of writers, musicians, artists, booksellers, journalists, and many random people that I don’t know and can’t really remember why I follow them. I drop and add people (sometimes the same ones) all the time. I like the account that posts antique fruit paintings but I can’t take most of the satirical ones. Sometimes I use the phone app — although it really is the mindkiller — and sometimes I use the chronological bookmark someone made (thank you!). I usually open it at least once a day — although I spend a lot less time on my laptop during the weekend so sometimes I’ll happily skip a day or two — and see what’s going on. And all those smart, funny people are right there, writing things that will spread out from wherever they are and maybe — as the tweet below did for apparently 800,000+ people — pop up on twitter for me to enjoy. Lucky me.