My IoB post has attracted the most ever comments along the lines of "why is this so long, tldr <favorite compression>". It's interesting. Kinda fascinating. We've been in tldr/compression mode so long, we've forgotten that elaboration has its own motivating logic and demand.
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The fact that I enjoy doing this, see value in it, and enjoy the conversations that follow, is one reason I'm not truly a subcultural person, and am more normie than a lot of sophisticated, subcultural people who read me (with impatience and frustration).
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These readers tend to not just be already where I am, they are often a few clicks of edge-insight ahead of me. I'm typically bringing up the rear of an idea, and trying to drag in people who haven't even been in the conversation so far. It's almost a scaling model.
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For a Very Online person who's 6 months ahead of me, I'm belaboring the obvious in tediously overwrought form. For the reader a year behind me, I'm giving them a shortcut to leap 19 months ahead in the zeitgeist, leapfrogging the subculturalists
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This is why subcultural scenes often seem like they're weirdly caught in a time warp. It is possible to wrangle the discourse around them, via leapfrog mechanisms that teleport a crowd past them via longform wormhole. I think I mixed 6 metaphors in 1 tweet here.
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This is a game that many people who've tried to take writing cues from me don't get. They think 5000 words is about getting 1 year ahead of the subcultural edge. No. You'll never, as an individual writer, manage that effectively. 5000 words = 10x more people drawn in to "now++"
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When I *actually* want to leave the subcultural edge behind and foray out past the frontier on my own, I use a very, very different writing style that is basically incomprehensible to people who don't follow me long term (that's basically what I'm trying to codify as blogchains)
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End of conversation
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