This is going a rant. More of an "old man yells at cloud" type of moment... So, feel free to leave the article now before suffering it 😋
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I Wanna be a Grifters and I promise that after 10K followers, I will be a DevRels so
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Follow Me
Also, a link to your profile? Seriously? What are we? Rookies??!! You need to do it the grifter way! Create a link directly to a follow popup!
I learned that trick from a Twitter Grifter (for real). That's how he shared his Twitter profile online.
Oh my god, I don't know this 😳 I have to add this into my websites now!
If it works, it works.
I actually did...somehow wasn’t following you (hey, 10 years off social media, I am like a grandpa relearning things! 🤣)
<the grifter>you are my followers number 300! You have earned a full access to my profile account with all the tweets and content I share. Not only this but you will get such content automatically in your home feed so you don't have to check my account all the time! New content each day that will blow your mind and make you the best developer</the grifter><the devRels>a new follower .. ok .. let's hope he understand some CSS</ devRels>Brilliant.
Although you forgot to say that you get extra bonus content if you like and retweet this tweet so I can tell you aren't a grifter!!
well, I am still new to grifting 🤓 I will need time to build my grifts database
Joke's on you, I already follow you 😋
...wait..... 🤔🤔🤔
And I already follow you, but that is only because you popped up in my Twitter feed, I really need to start searching out people I like on DEV to follow on Twitter...as I said, grandpa is just getting into this social stuff...now how do I send a Twitter again?!
Ok, grandpa, this is how you write a Twitter again:
I look forward to reading your Twitters 😊😊😊
On it right now, so £25 a tweet, can I get a bulk discount?
Of course! If you send 10 cheques, you can do £20 each instead of £25. That's 8 tweets for the price of 10.
I had to double check that I didn't post this! I thought I was the only angry ranter on here! 🤣
The thing is, it is prevalent in any medium. Plenty of zero value posts on here get lots of attention.
I think you are looking at it backwards. Why is the low quality, high quantity mechanism working? Why is the clickbait and everything else working?
Society.
We have taught young people that everybody is perfect (Instagram life), you can be anything you want to be (general super positive rubbish) etc.
Couple that with the fact we are in an industry so overloaded with information that it is overwhelming (a new JS library every week, to fix the problem with the previous JS library but introduces 10 new problems that will be fixed by the next JS library) and everybody is looking for shortcuts and quick fixes.
You and I would be the same if we had been exposed to the same crap, we have just managed to develop a filter.
Imagine trying to enter an industry where every week there is a new platform to learn, where people think React is JavaScript, or that learning TailWind first is a good idea instead of the fundamentals.
Then imagine you see someone who tweets about JavaScript one day, Python the next, Ruby the next. Someone who seems to be creating a new library every week.
You and I have the experience to know that either: they don't have a job and have the time to do it all, or they have hired people to do it, or they have recycled something that someone else has done and claimed credit.
I probably could not have identified such things at 16.
So I would follow them, wonder how they do it all and hang on their every word. The second they recommend a book I would buy it. Doesn't matter how crap the book actually is, the person with 100k followers said it was good so I must learn it.
Grifters will always attract an audience, they have 100k followers so they must be useful. And they are, they are useful for knowing how to game the system, how to find retweetable and shareable content. Learn from them!
I am studying them with great interest, hoping to slip some real knowledge and truly useful resources under the radar, but you still have to play the game, get the following and then start making change.
It is why "imposter syndrome" appears every week in the feed. The feeling of inadequacy most people experience is down to the Instagram and Twitter façade of the perfect life and popularity.
The only thing you or I can do is to up our game. Create even better content, encourage others to do the same, and just hope that one day the people who are sucked in by the grifters and click bait realise that there is no value there. That there are no magic bullets.
Society and its high expectations are definitely a problem. But it's easy to blame society for everything, it's an abstract entity (it's everyone and no one at the same time). Grifters are more defined entities. And taking advantage of people when they are in need is an ugly thing to do.
You are 100% right. We can learn a lot from them. They are great at marketing, gaming the system, and getting people's engagement (in general). But at this point, their post create more annoyance than curiosity in me. I unfollower/blocked a few of them these past weeks, and I'm tempted to unfollow/block some people that retweet them often.
I like your suggestion of upping up our game and create better content, and especially encouraging others to do the same. Will it make a difference in the long term? Worth trying.
Long term - quality wins, but I think the reality is short term cutting corners to build a platform large enough to then share quality stuff is the route to go!
Do everything the grifters do (other than shilling crap products...by all means promote super quality stuff though) for a year, at 10k - 20k followers you have enough of a platform to pivot and still grow.
That is the dilemma I have been facing, accessibility gets no views, so I am pivoting to popular stuff and will drip feed the accessibility in as part of the content for a while, as I am going to launch a business next year and a large follower count is a good sales tool for investors! Plus a nice platform to announce from.
As for grifters I agree it is horrid behaviour!
We live in a society
We found the Joker! (double meaning!) 😉
Putting on my Grifter makeup right now
🤣
Do you want to know how I got these
scarsfollowers? Huh?My father was a grifter...and an influencer.
And one night, he start tweeting more furiously than usual.
Mommy goes to the plug for the Wi-Fi to stop him.
He doesn't like that. Not...one...bit.
So with me watching he takes his phone and starts taking selfies.
He points the phone at me. "Why no grifting?"
He puts the flash on and gets really close.
"Why no grifting?",
He adds a filter,
"Lets put a winking emoji on your face"
And...why no grifting?
If you zoom out, you can apply this to many groups on twitter and other social media platforms. I think it encapsulates that era of social media and the businesses behind them. The economics of social media means they chase eyeballs and to get those eyeballs, you need to have content that is provocative. If you incentivize people chasing numbers, it moves digital platforms in the direction of a digital informercialand. Until social media and tech can change the incentives and break away from engagement metrics, there will always be groups like this. The only option as an individual is to filter them out, or ditch the platform.
You are 100% correct. This is not unique to Tech Twitter, it happens in every single community online and offline, and the current incentives online only promote this type of practices. I like the term you used: "digital informercialand". I may
steal ituse it in the future :)I will deploy my digital rights bots to claim royalties 😉
It is a web intent. The Twitter documentation describes it as a a way "to help users easily follow a Twitter account".
Using it, you can create a link/button that redirects to a Twitter account with the "Follow this account?" popup already open. The code is simple
https://twitter.com/intent/follow?screen_name=[TWITTER_HANDLER]. For example, a follow intent to my Twitter account 😉😉: twitter.com/intent/user?screen_nam... or twitter.com/intent/follow?screen_n... (they both work)I've noticed this, too. It's fascinating how they've moved into the dev space on twitter. One of the things I look for is a youtube account where they actually code.
That being said, I'm a bad dev twitterer. I rarely post about dev these days! I should make an effort.
Not everything has to be about dev, I really enjoyed your drawing live sessions. Have you done any lately?
@inhuofficial why did you remove your answer? I was about to reply 😬
I think he will make it a post instead 😅
You know that most of my essays are in comments! Hell, my comments are much better than my crappy posts are!
There, it is back now! I got distracted and didn't realise I had done that, I was just trying to check I hadn't left any swear words in it without blanking them!
Oh crap, I was meaning to edit it...two secs!
Being part of DevTwitter I love this compilation.
You are absolutly right with your classification
If this comment reaches 100.000.000 likes y will answer you with a Youtube video
The solution seems pretty obvious: stop reading twitter. There is nothing of value on the entire site that can't also be found somewhere else that isn't twitter.
Same logic applies to DEV. And yet, here we are.
The solution isn't stop reading Twitter, in the same way that the solution to have zero car accidents isn't stop driving at all. Twitter is just a platform for sharing and, from my experience, a great one for reaching out to new people and learning new things.
Thanks for the post! In hindsight, this proves several reasons why Twitter wasn't all good even before the crazy rich man took over.
Could you ellaborate? I don't fully understand what you mean.
Thanks. That totally makes sense.