My first weeks in tech X (Twitter). Big disappointment
It may be because I live in Latin America, but I have never used Twitter, nor do I had an account. I just used it sometimes to see tweets from personalities that became a hot topic or sometimes as a source from other news sites, but almost never directly.
Some weeks ago I was thinking that as a professional in the technology world I didn’t have much visibility. I have started this blog a couple of years ago just to abandon it a few weeks later. I noticed that a lot of developers used twitter to connect and share their work, so I decided to give it a try.
Not a good start
The first thing I encounter while trying to create an account was a probably useless spree of infinite captcha images. That I have to make twice because I make the big mistake of going to the bathroom in the middle of it (yes, there were that many captchas) since it gave me an error at the end of my first try.
Immediately as I created my account Twitter restricted my account, apparently to make sure I am not a bot… I knew that before I could just post for an audience I had to build that audience. And that I would have to go into the feed and interact with people. But this restriction is for sure going to slow my growth.
I didn’t want to spend countless hours consuming content just to get a single like back from the person that posted it. No, this is going to be a grind. It will be long before I could get any visibility on my posts. Thankfully I am not in a hurry, I have some ideas and projects that I want to build anyways so hopefully one of those is going to get some attention.
Everybody is grinding
After setting up my interests I am greeted by a lot of people with fairly new accounts trying to get followers by any means necessary. Some of them copy/pasting #connect #algorithm posts
And some other people posting a lot of… how to say it without being rude… posting a lot of crap. “What text editor do you use? I use Microsoft Word“, “You like mornings?“, “What do you think about javascript?“. I mean, if you are going to post 10 times a day at some point the creativity is going to take a hit but this is just noise for most people.
Another common type of post I encounter a lot is the engagement bait. At least the people that post this are trying a bit harder, they usually do this to gain some visibility and post interesting content sometimes.
I graduated, is it a good thing?
Three weeks after I created my account I finally got the notification that my account was no longer restricted. This means my post will be more visible and discoverable.
Up until this point I didn’t have any visibility, no body was viewing my posts, my replies were only seen by the Original poster and that was it. This gain me the incredible amount of 4 followers.
Hopefully now I can connect with more people we will review this soon.