[Weekend Drop] Grifters and Content Creation Traps

Welcome to Weekend Drops! Every weekend I drop one full length interview or conversation I had recently. This is for folks who want to keep up with me — if you came for the 5 minute mixtapes, I hope its easy enough to delete! Let me know how I can improve this for you.

Video source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sL_uefhT51g

Share original tweet: https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1372013877731368961

Transcript

Maksim Ivanov: [00:00:00] having a one today. We're going to be talking with Shawn Wang. Who is mostly known as Swyx and we're going to discuss, Oh Shawn, could you please introduce yourself first? 

swyx: [00:00:19] Hey everyone. I'm Shawn. I am also known as Swyx. I am head of developer experience at Temporal dot IO, but I'm also on Twitter a lot, and a general content creator.

And my principal capacity. So I'm here to talk about that. 

Maksim Ivanov: [00:00:32] I mostly know about Shawn by reading his article learning in public, which is great. And also other essays. You probably know him as well. If you read this article, it's about we surely learning in public, actually showing your progress, sharing your progress putting out the material and learning by, by doing right.

swyx: [00:00:49] Yeah, exactly. It's something that when I reflect on my own career every time I've done it it's really been the determinant of the majority of my success. So that's when I went to do a speech for my bootcamp. That was the title of my speech. I wrote it down in like one afternoon and then I tweeted it and it just went viral.

I was like, okay, this is something that people want to hear about. And three years later I'm still doing it. It's it's still amazing. And I want to spread the word. 

Maksim Ivanov: [00:01:14] Shawn has some great essays. So for sure, Shawn knows how to make some great content, but I would like to give some backstory to this call.

Let me share my screen. I want to show the tweet and what will be the matter of today's discussion. Share this screen. 

swyx: [00:01:29] It's always scary. It's always scary when people show you on three you're like, what am I going to say? Yeah. 

Maksim Ivanov: [00:01:36] So there is this thing in Twitter, which I understand totally. And I also did it.

This is why we're doing this stream today. So their power is growing, the singularity approaches and then a bunch of tweet threads with five websites or whatever amount of websites that will save some amount of time. Per week or per day or per something you can see I'm here as well. One funny thing though, is that they have on the one, like, and retweet, but whatever, usually they get a lot of engagement and this is why people do it.

swyx: [00:02:06] It is even if ours, that's what this is a problem. 

Maksim Ivanov: [00:02:10] That's a problem. So, as I understand, do you think that this is a wrong approach to create concentrate? And first of all, like to discuss. What is wrong with this thing? 

swyx: [00:02:20] Wrong is a strong word. I'm making fun. And it's okay to make fun is looking at me.

Funny things. That's all. That's all. So, what that team was doing was that what, if you took them seriously, right? Like, cause every tweet was like, I was, this tweet will save you two hours per week. And then the next day it was like four hours. And then she was taking five. It makes me think it's 10.

So I was like, why did you just edit it all up? Will you just not need to work anymore? 

Maksim Ivanov: [00:02:43] Yeah eventually this is why this is a tweet where I posted about this stream. I said eight hours a day, straight ahead. So we can skip the whole word. They be 

swyx: [00:02:51] free. Yeah. So it's obviously making fun of the exaggeration.

And I mean, I get why people do it, so yeah, that's, as far as I go, I don't call it out as like anything evil. I just think it's obviously not a very genuine, because nobody really thinks that you're saving any amount hours. So you're obviously lying to your own people just to get some clouds.

And it's also, I think that there's a Buzzfeed notification of Twitter where people are. Yeah, people are trying to turn their threads into listicles. Basically the promise, something absurd at the top, and then they'll list five or seven or 10 projects. Most of which they just saw when Googling around just before tweeting that they don't actually use.

Right. I see a lot of this as well on grifter Twitter with like, here are the top seven JavaScript projects ranked by a number of GitHub stars. Well, thank you very much. I didn't know that. And it's very clear that there's just no effort put into it now, but people just like it.

Maksim Ivanov: [00:03:45] Yeah. It's the path of the least resistance. And actually I was with my Twitter was actually even less genuine. I was actually. I didn't even care for the actual content or they wanted to see if does this technique work. So it was like double to let two layers of 

swyx: [00:04:01] uninjured equity, I guess nine is fine.

Yeah. I mean, monkey see monkey do we are all Twitter is partially a game and you're always trying to figure out what you're playing for. It turns out that every people have different rules and I'm trying to inspire people to have a higher level of. Quality or purpose for themselves than likes, because I think that is the lowest common denominator.

And I, that's not something I want to see in my life. I think my I've wasted enough of my own life on that. It's fine. If you want to do it, I. It's it's it's an open platform. Do whatever you want to do on your own account. It's I'm not telling you what to do on your own car. I also have the right to be fun, 

Maksim Ivanov: [00:04:43] even walking my next week that actually got some bitter tastes after doing it.

Just like when using Tinder, I got into some mode that they didn't really like when I was dehumanizing people who. I consider just as followers instead of like trying to make genuine connection, but I totally understand why I would continue doing it just because it's the path of least resistance and you eventually might get very good responses on that.

So this I would say platform or the platform itself encourages people to continue pushing out this sort of content to get likes and retweets. 

swyx: [00:05:17] Encourage is a strong word that you are, you have agency in your own choices and the kind of people that you wanted that connect with you based on those kinds of tweets are very low quality people.

Just quite frankly, in my opinion. And the, and I, there's no point engaging with those people. So yeah, I mean, th there, there are other games to play on Twitter, which is for example, networking with high value people. And I'm not saying like, of course every everyone is variable and everyone, every person has value.

There are just. Some people who don't value quality and it, they just respond to very like, okay. It's like the people who click on like the Buzzfeed articles. Right. And like the, here's the seven secrets to losing weight. You wo...