7 Ways to Be Insufferable On Twitter

Inspired by Tim Urban's legendary "7 Ways to Be Insufferable Facebook", I have written the modern-day equivalent for how to be insufferable on Twitter.

The internet has given us unprecedented leverage to annoy each other.

And perhaps no other platform allows us unbridled access to our more base impulses than Twitter.

Below are a few ways to be utterly and completely insufferable on Twitter.

Let's please stop doing these things as soon as possible.

1. Tweeting fortune cookie replies to fortune cookie tweets

The only thing worse than fortune cookie tweets are the replies.

Each reply competes to sound wiser than the last, creating a self-replicating strain of bro wisdom that extends far beyond the outer edges of acceptable behavior.

2. Tweeting about how you stopped using technology for a period and enjoyed it

I suspect that some of us are thinking about our drafts folder while worshiping at the alter of nature.

The only outdoor activity these tweets make me yearn for is being launched into the sun.

3.Sharing a “must-follow” list of the same five people everybody already follows and acting like you mined gold

Bruh, everybody knows about these accounts.

Also, why are these lists always 100% dudes?

Return your shovel, o’ miner. This gold's been mined.

4. Parroting Naval

Every day, thousands of people decide that the highest-leverage thing they could be doing is tweeting about leverage.

Please *leverage* your common sense instead; regurgitating other people's ideas verbatim is low-impact.

5. Tweeting a photo of a physical book page

It is inspiring that you can read, but very few people want to pinch-zoom into a pixelated photo to decipher a dim, underlined passage buried underneath Cheeto stains and a huge block of text.

Post a Goodreads screenshot. Please.

6. Asking people to help you reach a follower milestone

"Who's going to get me to 1,000 followers?"

"Help my friend reach 1,000 followers!"

"Wow, you guys, 1,000 followers. Thank you."

You have offered me no value. Please shoot me.

And don’t stop until I cross 10k followers.

7. Sharing a “hot take” that is profoundly agreeable

I don’t know who needs to hear this (lol), but if 150k people retweet something it might not be a hot take.

It might be something else:

A widely-held, self-evident belief.

In conclusion

Welp, that's a wrap.

What'd I miss? Reply to the tweet thread version of this post here with your answers.

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Thank you to all of Foster members who contributed ideas for this post: Kushaan Shah, Joshua Poh, Joel Christiansen, Charlie Bleecker, and Rob Hardy.

And a few other Compounders who helped punch up some early drafts of this: Sara Campbell, Piyali Mukherjee, Kyla Scanlon, Nate Kadlac, Lyle McKeany, Yina Huang, Anushri Kumar, David Vargas, Nick Drage, and Dan Hunt.