2 things I hate about Twitter
Quasi-giveaways and low-effort newsletters.
I swear I lose 5% of my neurons every time I browse Twitter. Thus, I'll never fully lose all of my brain cells, but I'll get pretty close if I keep going on Twitter and seeing these things.
1. Quasi-Giveaways
Quasi-giveaway (noun): A type of giveaway tweet where the tweet author offers a free product (typically a Notion template) if the respondent likes, retweets, and replies to the tweet. Once the respondent has satisfied the requirements, the tweet author DMs the product to the respondent.
A classic example:
As you can hopefully see, quasi-giveaways are characterized by:
- low-effort Notion pages or low-quality ebooks (typically with no organizational framework. they are often just constructed of copy&pasted information and disguised as a "swipefile")
- baity hooks ("People are making millions of dollars using GhatGPT in 2023." yeah. like maybe 20 people in the whole world?)
- taki writing (there is no reason to separate the first three sentences in the above example. they could all go in one paragraph.)
Quasi-giveaways are extremely common—at least on my side of Twitter. They drive me crazy. They are gaming engagement (likes, retweets, comments) to promote content that isn't even good. It's just some crappy Notion template or ebook.
2. Low-Effort Newsletters
Low-effort newsletter (noun): A newsletter specializing in listicles which could be entirely written by a monkey, if you gave the monkey internet access and the knowledge of how to copy-paste.
Here's a common selection of listicle titles:
[number]of reasons why you should[quit your job / eat healthier / start journaling / become a software engineer / become an Indonesian monk][number]of the most useful[websites / tools / ChatGPT prompts / skills]to[accelerate / 10x / advance / superchargeyour[productivity / learning / wisdom / intelligence][number]of the best[insights / ideas / tweets / tips]I learned this[week / month / year]
I don't have an inherent hate for listicles themselves.[1] But I do hate newsletters where most of the content is "oh I copy-pasted (read: stole) this insight from someone else!"
One example of a low-effort newsletter is James Clear's. Sorry to the 3 million people who subscribe, but you cannot tell me that this is valuable content:
These low-effort newsletters contribute negative value to society because the content already exists and they are just filling the internet with duplicate content.
old man yells at cloud
You're probably wondering: Nathan, if you hate quasi-giveaways and low-effort newsletters so much, why don't you just eliminate them from your Twitter feed? I should. You're right. But I think it's worth complaining about these things to at least try to usher in change, you know? If you see quasi-giveaways or low-effort newsletters, just don't engage with them. If enough people can "boycott" them, they'll (hopefully) fall out of style.
Listicles can be a valid way to structure an article that would otherwise be unstructured. ↩︎