10 ridiculously simple tips I wish I knew about building an audience when I first started:

I mostly winged it 🤫

Let me share my lessons so you don't have to:

(a thread 🧵)

1/ Switch from being a consumer to a creator

If your default is opening social media and binging on updates from others, there's a problem. The world needs to know what YOU can offer, and I believe everyone can add value. So first, switch to intentionally becoming a creator.

2/ Start very small and build "Atomic habits"

Most beginner creators people aim too far high and crash. It never works for me. Instead choose tiny habits like 2 tweets a day in the morning. Or 1 video for Youtube. Or 1 short essay each day on Substack. Optimize for consistency.

3/ Pick one social platform to create and stick with it

What comes naturally to you? Writing your thoughts, choose Twitter. Editing interesting footage and layering a voice-over? Choose Youtube. Short essays? Choose Substack. Pick one and stick with it for at last 1 month.

4/ Find your niche

Don't focus on big bold segments with hundreds of active prolific creators already fishing. Find specific audiences and move towards them.

I was a no-code maker in 2018 so that niche came naturally. Later, I expanded to the community niche. Now #buildinpublic

Tomorrow, Zynga shuts down FarmVille on Facebook after 11 years. I wanted to share the story of how we created it and why it has played such an important role in the evolution of gaming. 1/x

The real innovation of FarmVille was in making games accessible to busy adults, giving them a place to invest and express themselves and be seen by people in their lives as creative. People thought of FarmVille as a sort of Etch-a-Sketch. 2/x

It was the first game at scale that leveraged big data, and almost everything inside the game was tested and optimized. FarmVille became a training ground for a generation of entrepreneurs and product managers. 3/x

In 2008, Happy Farm reached 20+ million daily active users, setting off a wave of competition from game developers, and numerous farming games began to hit the market. 4/x.

On February 6, 2009, FarmTown reached 1 million DAU on Facebook. Farm Town combined the moving maps from MyFarm with avatars in Zynga’s YoVille. I wrote the date on the wall, and said we need to count the days until we are in the market with our own game. 5/x

An annoying feature in an "influencer" career is that it seems like you'll be much better off if you're "nice" to everyone.

You can always collaborate or "swap." You don't like their work, or maybe even them as a person, but gosh can you pass up this opportunity?

This might be an illusion. You're probably better off ignoring everyone and focusing on your own work.

Then again, it might not be an illusion. It's something I've noticed with successful Hollywood people. They're so damn nice. Either they are extremely agreeable people, or they have to fake it.

However, it's a much more people-oriented business than publishing.

1. I'm the CEO of a platform for females & know I have a unique insight into the single sex space debate. I see it play out in real time.

During our 1st MVP test phase, 1000s of TW onboarded & created "KILL TERF" profiles.

Are we supposed to take these seriously or not?

2. I fought to include TW on Giggle but the reality is I fought not knowing the hostility of the situation. I was shocked & devastated by the KILL TERF & other obscene profiles, but...

Is "KILL TERFS", "RAPE TERFS" & "LOOK AT MY GIRL DICK" what we can except in the real world?

3. Is it "just" something said to women online or is it something that would be done in "analogue" female spaces?

It's a really important questions to ask, because not only do women not want to read stuff like this... we don't want to physically experience it either.

4. It's important to remember, without this abhorrent behavior we'd all be having a very different debate.

This behavior has *added* to womens fear.

You can dismiss it if it doesn't suit your agenda. But if you do, no solution to ensure the safety of *everyone* will be found.

5. When I read something like this, what stands out to me is the line "a lot of the time I'll get side eye or even outright harassment." Lucky you!

Imagine getting a rape threat.

When that statement is put into the context of the admission prior to it, it's scary for women.

How to get your first 1000 followers 👇

Start by taking notice of what people in real life ask you about. Chances are that if your friends are interested in something you're doing, the internet will help you find thousands more like them.

"But what if I'm not doing anything interesting?!"

Almost everyone is. It doesn't have to be anything spectacular. You might be:

- Learning a new skill
- Doing a side hustle
- Going for a road trip
- Remodeling your home
- Studying something obscure
- Losing weight
...

- Living frugally
- Moving countries
- Moving from the city to the country
- Homeschooling your kids
- Growing your own vegetables
- Leaving your job
- Looking for a new job
- Fighting an illness
- Volunteering

And so on.

Work backwards from what people ask you about.

Now, think about the answers you give when people ask you about the thing you're doing. Then write a short blog post answering a particular question. Example:

Title: Why I chose to grow my own vegetables

Body: Explain why, in under 5 minutes.

LRT: One of the problems with Twitter moderation - and I'm not suggesting this is an innocent cause that is accidentally enabling abuse, but rather that it's a feature, from their point of view - is that the reporting categories available for us do not match up to the rules.

Now, Twitter's actual policy is that wishes or hopes for death or harm are the same as threats. That policy has been in place for years. But there's no report category for hoping someone dies. You can only report it as a threat.

Which gives the moderator, who doesn't spend long on any individual tweet, mental leeway to go, "Well, there's no threat here." and hit the button for "no violation found".

They have a rule that says persistent misgendering or other dehumanizing language is not tolerated, but again - there is no reporting category for that. We have to report it as hate against a group.

So again, the moderator looks at that tweet, briefly in isolation, and sees what, without context, might look neutral or matter of fact. A series of tweets referring to somebody consistently by the same set of pronouns or a statement that somebody is a man or woman.

It makes me smile every time I notice IGListKit at work in Instagram. We put a lot of work into making and improving it. Proud to see it holding up 4 years later.

🧵 with some memories on how it was built:

At Instagram, product work slowed around the holidays, so we used the time to pay down tech debt. In winter 2014 I reviewed a +12k line refactor from UITableView to UICollectionView.

We recently dropped iOS 5 so we could use the new 6+ APIs without backwards compatibility.

That review taught me a lot about UICV: data sources should mutate in one place else risk out-of-sync exceptions, the first view layout may reloadData, sticky headers make good perf hard, and many more UICV tidbits

We used reloadData for everything and it worked, for the most part.

Except two things bugged the hell out of me:

1. No animated changes (duh)
2. Images could flicker and the like animation could cancel

I dug into the latter and learned that if you reloadData, every cell on screen gets reused. So even if nothing in the UI changes, you still reuse (or init) cells, bind data, set images, etc. that’s a lot of work!

How I built a 7 Million+ strong COMMUNITY on social media, in 5 years.

(A thread)

Video content is the past, present & future.

Golden rule of social media : People gravitate towards HUMANS & their stories.

The easiest way to attach people to your journey is COMMUNICATION through video.

If you cant come on screen, at least use voice. Video>Photo>Written.

From day 1 :
- Wrote down ALL ideas on paper (content pieces, growth strategies, future targets)
- Decided to expand my team, whenever my income allowed me to.
- Make. Money. First.
Don't just rely on YouTube income or brands for money. You may also provide SERVICES to fans.

But in the long term, BIG money will come from brands.

Therefore accumulate numbers and create your own niche.

How to get numbers?
- Entertain or Educate or Motivate

- Create videos/pieces that address people's most common questions/thoughts about the niche you've chosen.

As you grow through your base strategy of video creation (could be YT, IG Reels or even LinkedIn Video)...

You can further community loyalty through sharing pieces of your personal story. How?
- Vlogs
- Captions that expose your mindset.
- Tweets

Be a good storyteller.

The worst things I see among friends and people around me and in social media is they say who sees caste in 2020. They also say caste is wrong and it should be abolished. First friends please understand reality, don't come to a conclusion by seeing whatsapp forwards 1/n

Misleading YouTube videos and the common stuff that comes in cinema and in TV. First you must understand the biggest problem of India ia not Corruption but it's caste.Majority of movies we watch shows that that biggest problem of India is Corruption and if we stop it we will 2/n

Become a developed nation. But according to me these people are cheating us by hiding the biggest problem. For the people who say is there caste in 2020, I just want to ask a question. How many of you during your marriage search for your partner in same caste. 3/n

I think majority will do that, then how can you say there is no caste in 2020. Caste has just gone out of our names that too in TN only, but it's still there in everyone's home and everyone's minds. So please accept the truth and start your journey against it. 4/n

There is one group of people who speaks about everything about cinema, cricket and other stuffs, but when this topic comes to a discussion the becomes silent. I can understand that they don't want to speak about this because they may think it as a sensitive issue. 5/n

social media use really calls for something closer to a driver's license than terms of service... most apparent bad behavior here is more incompetence than malice, like not knowing how to change lanes or take turns at a 4-way stop..

trump's history on twitter is something closer to a crazy car chase on LA streets than bad driving (with the cops MIA, but media helicopters in pursuit), but almost all unpleasantness around here is just poor driving skills

not that I'm advocating for a licensing regime... that would be a terrible thing. Do not need a social media DMV. But the underlying principles (as tested for eg. in the written and road tests) are pretty good.

Written test would test things like "safe following distance" (reply-guying = tailgating?)

Road test would actually expose you to routine provocations. Like, "make a left turn" = "deal with this concern troll"

As in the driving test, where an awkward, unnatural, and unintuitive bit, the parallel parking test, is the toughest bit, there would be some such awkward maneuver you'd have to learn (hmmm... what's the parallel parking equivalent on twitter?)

@Janinepolitic I really like the FDR fireside chat idea

10 days of darkness (after they shut down social media /end 230 exemption)

Many people are stressed by social media, especially Twitter.

Here is what I do to keep my sanity:

1. Be selective who you follow. Choose uplifting people and people you enjoy talking to.

2. Mute and block liberally. “But freedom of speech”. Nonsense. You choose your friends and parties in real life. Same applies to social media. It’s not immoral to ignore people who dunk on you. This also includes the annoying “devil’s advocate” personalities.

3. Choose your online persona. I mostly use Twitter for work and for engagement with the .NET community. But I’m still a human. Don’t let others dictate what you can and cannot talk about.

4. Choose wether you use your real name or a pseudonym. Social media is about authentic and real human encounters. Your name isn’t as important has how honest you can be in your conversations. Being anonymous is totally cool if that lets you be who you are.