Action Item: How to stop worrying and love Twitter

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Visakan Veerasamy is the friendliest man on Twitter. 

In a social media landscape dominated by outrage and cynicism, Visakan, or Visa as he’s known to his 26,000 internet friends, is a bouncy, earnest, autodidact using Twitter to connect and learn. 

He’s the author of Friendly Ambitious Nerd, but he’s best known for writing multi-layered, interlinked Twitter threads on everything from relationships, to the way status shows up in different types of social settings and networks, to technology, to how Santa magic intersects with shamanism. 

Our default perspective is that Twitter is a toxic place filled with people cynically trying to build their following however they can. And it certainly can be this.

But Visa doesn’t use it that way. He thinks of Twitter as a way to make friends—at scale. To him, each tweet is an invitation to connect with people, to share ideas, and enhance his perspective on the world. 

To Visa, Twitter is what you make it. And he’s made it into a place full of optimism and connection. Which, incidentally, has also been great for building his audience.

In this interview, talk about what makes a good tweet, how he composes his threads, and how he deals with the inevitable negativity associated with being “extremely online.”

Today’s Action Item is 794 words, that’s 3 minutes and 58 seconds of actionable. reading.

Let’s dive in! 

🌏 A good tweet is like an invitation to your audience

https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1039421328695091200

“A good tweet is one that invites interesting replies,” Visa told me. Visa isn’t writing tweets to get famous, he’s writing tweets to enthusiastically connect with other humans. Here are three ways he uses Twitter:

• 📚To make asks. He recognizes that this gets more rewarding with more followers, but VIsa loves to ask what people are reading and what they recommend he read.

• 👬 To make friends. Visa says that he was a bookish kid without a ton of friends, and that Twitter, above almost anything else, has been a way to meet and connect with people he might not otherwise have access to, or whose thoughts and work he might not even know about. “It just enriches my life in a way that it's hard to fully articulate,” he told me.

• 🧠 To make sense of the world. “I want to participate in the goings on of the intellectual life of the planet, of the sphere,” he says. “Any more art, more beauty, everything outside of my head is potentially more interesting than everything inside.”

👑🧵 How he makes his famous threads

Visa’s thread game is a reflection of what he’s thinking and reading about in the moment. He might take a particularly successful conversation and turn it into an essay or a blog post, but the thread itself starts from a very loose framework. 

• He looks through his notifications and timeline for inspiration. Anything that he finds interesting could be fodder.
• He just goes with whatever’s on his mind in the moment. Whether it’s something he’s been musing on for awhile, or a sudden shower thought, Twitter is the place he experiments with ideas, rather than polishing them first and then tweeting.
• He weaves all of his tweets together like a tapestry.  Visa doesn’t just create new threads, he responds to his own tweets, sometimes from several years ago, to create a web of connected thoughts. “I have this existing body of work that I can call back on and combine, and the cool thing is because I do it in public, people respond to it,” he told me. “Sometimes people will link their own threads, and the whole thing kind of becomes this very ongoing, elaborate multiplayer connect-the-dots game.”

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