I’ve admired Jimmy Dore since before he had his own show, and was doing Aggressive Progressives on TYT.

I still do, in spite of his occasional bad takes (and the stoned out of his gourd on-air moments).

I admire him even though he has a blue checkmark now (a thing he used to routinely make fun of people about), and even though he has starting doing in-segment ads for some green superfood powder. (I saw, dismayed, that Glenn Greenwald had done his first ad ever, for the same powder. They must be paying these guys a fucking fortune, that they’d trade even a little bit on their cred that way.)

Today, I cut down my list of the people I am said to be ‘following’ on Twitter, but Jimmy is still on the new short list.

This afternoon I was having a kind of unintentional day off, and I put up a post about the weather, and it was dull, even for a post about the weather.

Three minutes later I checked my new streamlined ‘following’ feed page and I saw that:

1) JD had posted (a one-word tweet of Wow, plus someone else’s retweet video), and,
2) No one had replied yet.

Dimly sensing an opportunity, I rushed to type the first thing I could think of, which turned out to be: “Will be expecting coverage, James”, plus winkyface emoji. If you think that’s about as exciting as the weather, I forgive you, because I feel the same.

In the picture, there are three lines of data in gray. The bottom one is about my boring weather post. What you see there is that no one has replied to it, retweeted it, or liked it, and the number 16 is for how many ‘impressions’ the post has–the number of times Twitter even offered it to anyone’s eyeballs at all.

Those low numbers are completely normal for a noob like me with 15 followers.

JD has half a million, and you can see how that changes things. As you can see from the top gray data line, his post of “wow” plus vid had been seen 42,000 times inside of half an hour, generating 96 replies and almost a thousand likes. An hour later, that grew to 134,000, 199, and 2367 respectively.

It’s the middle gray line that interests me. It shows the coat-tail effect of a nobody posting early, in the thread of a somebody.

Just being somebody-adjacent for those few minutes made it almost 50 times more likely that Twitter would show you my post. Two of the 764 people who did see it thought I was such a talented wit that they hit the Like button for me, woo-hoo!

You would think that my little game of timely opportunism was gonna be good for my, uh, brand.

Here’s why you’d be wrong to think it.

An hour into the adventure, I had over 1500 impressions, and the same 2 Likes.

But none of the unprecedented 1500 were motivated to even reply, much less follow me, or even visit my profile, where they could have theoretically been tempted to evolve into traffic to my YT page, watch a couple of vids, subscribe there …

Which is, I’ve said, the whole reason I’m bothering with Twitter in the first place.

To grow the Youtube channel to the point of monetization and start eating off the scraps Google would thus throw me for my efforts.

This is problematic, to an existential depth.

I know for a fact that Twitter has gained me a couple of YT subs, but so far that’s literally it. One or two, in exchange for days of effort and 300+ posts of my own.

Until something changes the game, it’s not a game worth playing, in strict cost-benefit terms. In … labor or capital terms. I speak here only of Twitter. Making and posting vids, and paragraphs like these, are their own reward.

I’m not giving up just yet.

But I do need to remain focused on what matters, in the days I have left, and I’m starting to believe that Elon’s Folly might not be in that category.