It would feel inauthentic to me to say "I play a character on the Internet." I would similarly not say I play a character at work. But there *is* a performance I'm doing, and it is a different performance than I put on for my daughter or at church or when RPGing with friends.
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We've all had a lifetime to work on the general performance-of-self but generally rather less to work on performance-of-self-as-a-professional or performance-of-self-on-Internet or performance-of-self-on-Internet-as-a-professional.
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Note that, while you are your own self, it's probably better to think of your Internet spaces not as an extension of yourself but a *shared* space between you and the people who you hope to meet. You can manufacture that space, in a way which optimizes for what you want.
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Some people argue loudly on Twitter. Consider whether it optimizes for your instrumental goals to do so; do not do so unless it optimizes for your instrumental goals. This goes for other things that you may be tempted to do on the Internet.
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Strive for a really high signal to noise ratio. Someone mentioned recently that their perception of my Twitter account is "like a blog." That's not an accident; Twitter is an explicitly professional space for me. I exercise discretion like I would at an IRL water cooler.
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I don't do an explicit count of how many slice-in-the-life tweets I'm allowed before talking about SaaS marketing, but there's a purpose for smalltalk. There's an infinite variety of perfectly fine use cases for a smartphone which don't belong in a professional presence.
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The most useful key on your keyboard is backspace. I used to delete an HN comment prior to posting for every one that saw the light of day, and I wrote *a lot* of HN comments; "Does this really add to the conversation?" was the implicit bar.
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Write more. It is a professional skill and improves with practice. Write more of the kind of thing that you want to write in the future. (This is another "If you spend most of your time being mad on the Internet you will be rewarded with..." observation.) Own what you write.
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I often wonder, from a product perspective, whether we're creating products which empower people to have successful interactions with them. Consider the words "My mentions", which expose a mental model which underpins a lot of specifically toxic behavior on specifically twitter.
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Twitter actively cultivates asymmetric conversations: every user is encouraged to believe that *they* are free to express themselves and that, simultaneously, they have their own little walled garden called My Mentions and that acting upon this space is a transgression.
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And does Twitter optimize for a product which would protect these intuitions of how it works? No, Twitter almost appears to optimize for breaking this, e.g. by limiting user visibility into how you're wading into Other People's Mentions.
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An aside about assymetric social network use: the most important insight I've ever heard about a software product was, I think, Yishan Wong on Facebook. Paraphrase: Everyone believes in a superposition of how privacy should work on Facebook.
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They simultaneously believe that *their* information should never be exposed in a surprising manner *and also* that they should be able to access all information about anyone they are interested in with no more than ~2 clicks.
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End of conversation
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