What's special about essays, and why I can't leave Twitter

I woke today to the algorithm being fixed.

Cross-posted from Twitter (except this version has footnotes). I woke today to the algorithm being fixed: no AI slop, celebrity news, or ragebait. It’s just like old times and my mutuals are celebrating like the Knicks just won. I don’t know if the changes will hold, but here are my thoughts.

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Twitter being bad for a while had a reverse-pandemic effect — the toxicity of the feed forced us to spend more time offline reading books, hanging out with friends, and diversifying interests, and now that it’s been lifted we can reunite to share what we found.

My brain feels so different from the last time I was regularly active. Part of that is because I went through some insane meditation stuff but it’s also because I’ve been consuming higher quality inputs and writing essays. My thoughts don’t occur as quippy tweet-shaped strings anymore — they have more nuance, more curiosity, and more generativity. Each thought or question seems to trigger 10 more equally promising and interesting paths I could proceed down. The world feels larger and more interconnected at a felt sense level, and I feel compelled to share not individual thoughts, which historically were the dominant currency here, but the particular web of connections I see between them.

But I can’t show you the whole web at once — the nature of reading dictates that text is experienced linearly. The thoughts and observations must be sequenced.

This is what essays are good for: documenting a journey of thought over time, like a trail carving through the forest. An essayist is always beating back the bush, pointing at sights and talking over them, with the reader following closely behind with nothing but intrigue and blind faith.

Alongside the ability to convey a set of thoughts and the associations between them, is the ability to replicate and induce states of consciousness. In other words, arrangements of attention and feeling. Now we are getting into literature, and poetry. We are getting into art. Words can hypnotize you.

All text can do this to an extent, but I have found essays the best medium for striking that balance, for presenting interesting ideas and inducing an altered state while reading them. The downside is it requires sustained attention, which is hard to come by these days. But my bet is that if it’s good, people will read it even if it’s longer than what they usually consume.

I remember when I started writing essays on Twitter in 2024. They had just added the feature to write long tweets, bypassing the old 280-character limit. People hated it, and it was cringe. But I wanted to prove something, which was that people's attention spans weren't as fried as we thought, we were just serving each other crap.¹ I would type 1,000-word essays straight into the compose tweet box and fire them off, and they would go viral. The charisma essay was one such case.²

People thought they were long, but they wouldn't say they were bad. They would say things like, "This is crazy long, but worth a read." I took it as a compliment.

Before long, many people were writing longer and longer tweets, but it was a hassle to scroll. The format wasn't built for that. So they added Articles, which produced a whole wave of engagement bait AI slop. I've tried cross-posting some of my essays from Substack as Articles, but the vibe is off. It may have been the algorithm at the time showing us low quality ones. Maybe Articles can be a beautiful thing and we just haven't seen it yet.

All in all, my movement to longer-form writing has produced growing pains. This is part of what makes it fun, using this site for things other than its intended purpose, but at the end of the day it's not meant for that. You can’t link to posts easily, and discovery tapers off quick. On Substack I can have a slow trickle of people finding things I wrote years ago.

For this reason I’m not sure if Twitter is still the best place for me.

And yet I can’t leave.

What makes Twitter great is that the people on it aren’t primarily writers. They do other things: build companies, research, invest, meditate, make art. The writing is incidental, or in service of other things.

Or they’re unemployed, which sometimes is even better. Hanging out in the margins of society means you can say things without worrying what your boss or family or peers may think. The future is born from some schizo-autist's reverie.

The people on Substack have social skills. This constrains the Overton window. This means they could never say some insane shit. They’re not cooking up research chemicals in their basement, or hyperstitioning movements, or starting cults, or fighting over which anime pfp’s are legitimate and which are LARPs. I am not saying these are good. I’m saying I love being in the asylum because it has entropy and aliveness. It’s a slot machine that sometimes changes your life. I have fallen in love, gotten jobs, solved medical ailments, and permanently reduced my suffering through esoteric meditation techniques I learned on here. You can be a jester and you can be a saint. Prostitutes consort with bodhisattvas, and billionaires with bums. The hierarchy does not matter. The regular rules don't apply. If you have something interesting to say, you have a seat at the table.

Substack also has an implicit creator-audience hierarchy, sort of like with YouTube. A person puts a piece of writing out, and people mostly nod their heads, but they don't get into the trenches with you. I like Twitter because if I say something slightly wrong, people will correct me. There's an intellectual push-pull here. I feel most alive when I am writing for about 30 specific people I respect and one degree of connection beyond them, because my interests are strange and I investigate them with a dogged intensity that turns off people with day jobs. Of course, it would make me happy if people found enjoyment in it at scale too, but I view that as a bonus.

If Twitter is my intellectual home and colosseum, Substack is where I am trying to find that bridge and capture the sparks. It’s not perfect. But it is the best place right now to write essays and build a body of work that isn't easily swept along a buzzing, ephemeral stream dictated by Elon's whims. It's also a place that allows people to support my writing if they wish to.

So on the passing chance that the algorithm changes again, I’d love to see all my friends and followers on there. As long as the experience is favorable here, I'll be tweeting. But follow me on Substack.

1. One of my favorite videos is this compilation of Donald Glover interviews and speeches. A lot of my creative philosophy is inspired by this video. At 2:00 he says, “I’m trying to make the best product. I believe the people deserve quality, and when they taste it, they see their own value, and they don’t ask for less.”

2. The charisma essay changed my life. After it went viral on Twitter, I cross-posted it to Substack, where it went even more viral. Even now, I run into people at parties who have read it long before we met. I reconnected with my childhood best friend around New Year’s because she saw it on her feed.