What Happens After You Become a Main Character on Elon Musk’s Twitter
Reading Time: 9 minutesWhat It’s Like to Suddenly Become Famous on Elon Musk’s Twitter, A platform overhaul made some users famous without warning. They’re baffled by it too., Twitter ‘main characters,’ like @lingerie_addict, discuss what it’s like going viral in the Musk era.
Among the bugs, glitches, and confounding UX choices that have plagued Twitter since Elon Musk’s October takeover of the company, there’s one particular algorithmic shift that’s rattled many a remaining user: the transformation of the main Twitter stream into the For You feed. Where once Twitter put the tweets of the accounts you followed in the order its system deemed most engaging, the platform now served you tons of random stuff from people you didn’t follow. And some of those people seemed to be in everyone’s feeds.
That Twitter’s changes had produced a new generation of ‘main characters’ became apparent in January with the viral fame of ‘menswear dude,’ aka fashion blogger Derek Guy, whose @DieWorkwear account had been recommended to many tweeters with little interest in fashion. It was both a positive and surreal development for Guy: a bigger audience and tons of new followers, but also a lot of cluelessness and hostility in his mentions, ultimately affecting the way Guy approached the platform (mostly with bemused glee).
As just one of the many journalists who spoke with Guy two months ago, I was curious about other influencers who’d met similar Twitter fates, and how it affected their approach to the Musk-era ‘town square.’ Another newly omnipresent account belonged to @lingerie_addict, aka Cora Harrington—also a longtime fashion blogger with a handle named after her website.
When I reached out to Harrington to ask about her own follower surge and the ensuing Twitter hullabaloo, she told me about two other peers in the space who’d been through the exact same thing: @AjaSaysHello, aka London-based fashion author and editor Aja Barber, and @OgLakyn, aka Los Angeles–based style consultant Lakyn Carlton. While those two didn’t see the astronomical engagement bumps that Guy and Harrington got, they did pick up tens of thousands of followers, making them prime examples of the changes on Twitter—where for some users sudden virality, puzzling engagement, and platform obstacles now define their experience, sans the opportunities for monetization available to viral tweeters of yore.
Last week, I held a video chat with Harrington, Barber, and Carlton to discuss Twitter virality in an era in which the platform is as volatile as ever. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Nitish Pahwa: When were the moments where you started noticing that you were getting more engagement across Twitter, a sudden boost in followers or interactions, and people were pointing out that you were on more people’s feeds? How did that affect the way you maintain your Twitter presence?
Aja Barber: I already had success on Instagram, and a lot of what I tweeted was really old posts from Instagram that the Twitter audience wasn’t receptive to before. So for me, I don’t think there’s been much of a change—more that I’m migrating information from my stronger platform to my Twitter platform.
But I definitely am a little more selective about what I tweet about. When I first jumped on Twitter—and I realize this is also an internet thing—it makes you feel like you have to have an opinion on everything. Everything. I had that come-to-Jesus moment for myself where I was like, ‘You don’t have to comment on everything you see.’ I feel like if more people could have that moment, it would be a much different space
I kind of say that Twitter is the place where you drop your thoughts and go. Because if you stick around too long, somebody’s going to be like, ‘Well, I have an opinion on your threat about white T-shirts because I’m allergic to this.’ Someone is going to make what you were saying very personal, whether it applies to them or not. You could be there all day if you don’t have boundaries.
Lakyn Carlton: I remember a flip happening in 2021, I want to say May. I had been tweeting here and there about getting back into styling. I wrote a [now-deleted] thread about how to find something that you’re looking for on the internet, and I offhandedly mentioned how I found this green skirt three years ago from Zara. So many people latched on to that and got so mad. They’re like: ‘You’re talking about fast fashion, but you’re shopping at Zara. Why not just thrift everything?’ It went so viral. But even within all that, there were a lot of people who really valued the information. I realized how to get engagement, and my followers started to grow from there.
Cora Harrington: For me, an inflection point happened in 2018, when I did a thread on ‘thin privilege‘ that wound up going viral globally, got reported on in the Daily Mail, got me an interview on headline news. That was when I noticed there was an uptick in visibility for my account that never really went away. I started going viral regularly for things that, it felt obvious to me, were suddenly appearing in everyone’s feeds all the time. In the five years since then, there have been several times where something will take off and go viral and bring an influx of followers and then it’ll level out. That’s how my Twitter presence has grown.
When I ran my site, having a lot of content on Twitter also brought people to my site, which is where I made my money. Prior to this past year, being on Twitter did contribute to my bottom line, because I could send that traffic back to my site, which led to advertising dollars. My site and my Twitter are part of what led to my agent and my first book deal and my agent.
How do you compare your Twitter experiences with other internet platforms, considering that all of you have been in these digital forums for years?
Aja Barber: My Instagram grew over the course of three years, but there were a few moments where my following grew really rapidly. I’ve been on Twitter since 2012, and up until about two years ago, I think, I had 2,000 followers. I always felt like Twitter was the space where, if I would got there and be like, ‘Hey, everyone: Maybe we should not buy sweatshop clothing,’ people would pelt you with tomatoes, like, ‘Boo, get lost.’
Something then happened where that stopped, and we started to pick apart a lot of popular excuses that people use to continue unhinged consumption. There are all these misconceptions surrounding fast fashion, ethical fashion, sustainable fashion. For a long time, you couldn’t have these conversations on Twitter. Then, it seemed like something happened overnight, where it was suddenly like, OK, now Twitter’s ready to have the conversation. So in a short amount of time, my account grew, not in a hundreds-of-thousands-of-followers way [like on Instagram], but where I felt the majority of my time was on Twitter.
Harrington: I’ve been on Twitter since 2009, which feels like entirely too much time to have been on Twitter. I no longer run the Lingerie Addict—I ran it for 14 years in total, and I gave that up in April of 2022 because I was ready to move my focus and interests beyond intimate apparel.
Carlton: I also decided to move all my most helpful tips to a Substack, and let me tell you how life-changing that has been. Not giving all of the advice in the world out via Twitter threads and instead giving it directly to people who actually follow me, it’s something that I’m way more careful about now. I paywall a lot of it, and that helps the experience because I can focus on more lighthearted things that will still occasionally go viral and get weird comments.
On social media, you have people who are eager to learn new things or jump into a movement, but at at the same time, the platforms incentivize a lot of yelling, argumentation, and shallow engagement with pretty deep topics, frankly. I’m curious what all of you think about how those sorts of dynamics have changed over time. Were there social networks better at these discussions than Twitter?
Harrington: Thinking back to the days of 2007-era LiveJournal, there was a sense of community, and there was a lot of sincere interest in conversation and discussion. Even when people disagreed, I don’t think it had the nasty edge that it has now. That is, I think, distinct for this current incarnation of social media: There’s a very deliberate nastiness and intention to hurt in a lot of interactions that I would not say was there in 2009 or 2011.
Twitter’s always kind of been the Wild West, but even in the early days of the ‘Fail Whale,’ you could have conversations with people. Your feed was organized chronologically, you could discover new accounts organically, you could engage with people. There wasn’t this overt sense of hostility. I also had a Tumblr, where I had somewhere between 80,000 and 90,000 followers before I had to shut it down. It was centered around my old topic being banned or minimized on various platforms. I had a very active Facebook page that wound up diminishing when Facebook’s algorithm and priorities changed.
There has been a shift in the last four or five years for sure. I would probably peg some of that shift in tone, honestly, to the election of Donald Trump, where I think a lot of people felt empowered to be extremely nasty in a way they didn’t necessarily feel empowered to be before. Combined with social media’s more overt emphasis on profit margins. People picking fights is very profitable.
It’s incentivized, basically. When I interviewed Derek Guy about becoming a focal point of Twitter, something he mentioned to me was seeing all these people coming in who know nothing and are making all these assumptions about you, sometimes calling you a Nazi for whatever reason.
Carlton: I think it is the nature of being on the internet. I think people who spend a lot of time online are either really passionate about something or really pissed about something. So, either way, you put a bunch of people who are passionate or pissed in the same space and it’s going to cause problems. It’s going to do something. You get this with any sort of niche online square that’s focused on anything we do every day, from food to fashion to games. You’re already there for a reason, and those reasons lend themselves to conflict.
Harrington: People will talk to you in a way that they wouldn’t speak to you in person. I was just thinking about that with this thrifting conversation where people said being a thrift reseller is being a landlord, which is absurd. But there were people coming into my mentions, talking to me all kinds of ways. I remember thinking: If I return the same energy back to you, people will call me a bully because I have over 100,000 followers. But you feel entitled to call me everything but a child of God because I said it’s fine to thrift and you should own less stuff. I think a part of this component is that for all three of us, we’re not saying anything that’s particularly radical.
Barber: I have never felt like absolute power doesn’t absolutely corrupt on the internet. I have been in quite a few spaces where you think everyone is aligned, and then it turns into a brutal bloodbath. Oftentimes I would talk people down from this righteous anger, then I would be like, ‘So don’t cuss people out you don’t know,’ and then they’d be like, ‘Yeah, you’re right.’
On the upside, I think people can definitely find spaces to dig in a little bit deeper and feel validated. I credit the internet with giving me the ability to talk about race and racism, because I grew up in a predominantly white area. Up until I was probably in my mid-20s, I felt like I was existing in spaces where I couldn’t really be my full self.
Twitter has been breaking a lot in recent times. You all have hopped from platform to platform over the years—do you have plans in mind for if Twitter ever actually collapses?
Harrington: I see my role moving forward as more centered around public scholarship and public education. There are so many other people seeing what we have to say and who want to know more but aren’t sure how to because this education is often siloed. It’s meant to exclude people who aren’t a part of these various communities—the literary or academic communities, for example. What I see my transforming or transitioning role becoming over the next two years, I hope, is teaching people the things that I’ve learned that were exciting to me, that helped to change my worldview, and transmitting it to them so that they can then tell other people. Because that’s how I think a lot of these things are going to pick up.
That said, if I win the lottery, I’m out. I’m bouncing. If I’m independently wealthy, y’all are never seeing me again. But right now, that’s what I see my future as being, and that’s what makes me passionate. Until it doesn’t anymore, which might happen because people are getting real mean out there. I’m hoping there are other opportunities in my future. But for me, it’s all connected to sharing these stories and making these things more visible to people who want to know more. That’s part of why I tried to chase and keep up with various platforms, which is an exercise in futility. We don’t own those platforms.
Carlton: Lately, I’ve been getting more attention from major publications, which is really cool. But in a way I do feel up in the air, because every day I’m like, ‘Well, when is Twitter going to go lights out, and what am I going to do after that?’ It’s a bit of a precarious position.
Barber: I’ve always just viewed the internet as a tool, which means I’m here for a good time and not a long time. I want to continue writing. Having a platform has allowed me, as a Black woman, to be in spaces that traditionally have not wanted to let us in. I’ve been blogging since 2006, but nobody really cared what I had to say until I had a platform. I have to just look at it as: Do the things that you want to do in this space, allow it to get you into traditional places that didn’t let you in, and then, when it’s time to go, cut out. Don’t stay till the point it makes you mean. I look at authors like Zadie Smith and Sally Rooney, who have no internet presence, and I love that for them. I’m trying to work toward having that myself, to be honest.
I just feel like Twitter is transient for me. I don’t want to say I’m not attached to it, because I’ve made some lovely friends and the space has allowed me to do some cool things. But all internet spaces are owned by internet companies and not by me, unfortunately. So I have to detach myself from it and think about where I want my long-term legacy to be, and it’s probably not going to be there.
Ref: slate
MediaDownloader.net -> Free Online Video Downloader, Download Any Video From YouTube, VK, Vimeo, Twitter, Twitch, Tumblr, Tiktok, Telegram, TED, Streamable, Soundcloud, Snapchat, Share, Rumble, Reddit, PuhuTV, Pinterest, Periscope, Ok.ru, MxTakatak, Mixcloud, Mashable, LinkedIn, Likee, Kwai, Izlesene, Instagram, Imgur, IMDB, Ifunny, Gaana, Flickr, Febspot, Facebook, ESPN, Douyin, Dailymotion, Buzzfeed, BluTV, Blogger, Bitchute, Bilibili, Bandcamp, Akıllı, 9GAG