I joined Twitter a while back because someone said it is good to learn in public. You get noticed and land opportunities, etc. So, I started. I had my profile set up, my shiny college tag in bio, and ready to go. I posted for a while, mostly my daily LeetCode grind (for placements) and some research work I was doing. I was told it helps as you are accountable. But nobody cared, and I stopped caring as well eventually. I wasn't myself. I looked at Twitter as if it was LinkedIn. My efforts were honest, but the motive was not.
The only good thing I did during that time was fund this kid to get a laptop (a lot of people did). He had this post about him learning coding on a phone. I mean, this kid was high agency AF. No excuses.
I got busy with life, and placement season was upon me. I forgot about Twitter for a while. I rejoined (more active) in the past few months. I repeated a lot of my earlier mistakes again, to be honest. Until I interacted with this one guy.
I asked a question under one of his tweets, and he DM'd me with a paragraph. A thoughtful one at that. Which forced me to DM him back with a thoughtful paragraph as well. And so on, we had a conversation—a surprisingly deep one. Not a 3 AM high with friends deep, but still. It made me understand a few things about Twitter. Made me question my motives. Made me pivot. PIVOT! Sorry, huge "Friends" fan.
I decided to change my motives with Twitter. I decided that I am here to be myself, have fun, and have good interactions. Get to know people better. Get motivated by some. And maybe motivate some myself. Cheer others on. Make memes (working on my meme skills). Have fun. Say some stupid shit. Say some cool shit. And that's all. I need to remind myself of this constantly. It's easy to get lost as the brain is wired to crave social approval.
So here I am. I don't know about networking, but I am happier. I guess, in the end, that's the whole point.