My Favorite Twitter People

I’ve gotten lazy in my old age, and find that Twitter is a good way to let others do my thinking for me. Those who think particularly profound thoughts get hearts as endorsements. Out of curiosity, I wrote a script that tallied my tweet “likes” and ranked the recipients.

In order of likes-received, here are my 10 favorite Twitter people from the past year:

  1. @NickSzabo4
  2. @pierre_rochard
  3. @DontPanicBurns
  4. @saifedean
  5. @bitstein
  6. @nic__carter
  7. @interfluidity
  8. @Ragnarly
  9. @sonyaellenmann
  10. @WahWhoWah

Looks like my favorite tweets are 90% crypto-anarchist, 10% neoliberal. But who cares about me, let’s look at who Silicon Valley thought leaders are favoriting!

Elon Musk is always entertaining. He gets a lot of grief for the time he spends on Twitter, but it looks like his Twitter activity is largely related to work. @elonmusk‘s most ❤️ed accounts:

  1. @Tesla
  2. @SpaceX
  3. @TheOnion
  4. @ElectrekCo
  5. @cleantechnica
  6. @fermatslibrary
  7. @Teslarati
  8. @mayemusk
  9. @InsideEVs
  10. @kimbal

Here’s Twitter founder @jack’s top ten likes:

  1. @kanyewest
  2. @sza
  3. @elonmusk
  4. @leslieberland
  5. @freialobo
  6. @sriramk
  7. @Larakate
  8. @marciadorsey
  9. @chancetherapper
  10. @michaelmontano

@pmarca used to be one of my favorite twitter personalities, until the PC police drove him off the platform. These days he still interacts using ❤️s. Marc Andreessen’s top ten:

  1. @ComfortablySmug
  2. @BaldingsWorld
  3. @jessesingal
  4. @clairlemon
  5. @ProperOpinion
  6. @St_Rev
  7. @rivatez
  8. @webdevMason
  9. @ne0liberal
  10. @iowahawkblog

The investigative journalists at The Outline already jumped on this case and identified Andreessen as a closet neo-Nazi.

Why do we even use this feature? ❤️s are a good source of data for targeted ads, or for Twitter to rearrange your timeline in a way that confirms existing bias. There’s zero benefit conferred to the user, but we keep clicking it anyway. Maybe the Like button is just a digital version of the close-door button in an elevator: A meaningless form element that provides symmetry in the user interface and helps us feel like we’re doing something productive, while we slowly relinquish control to the machines, one button-press at a time.

One thought on “My Favorite Twitter People

  1. The likes serve the crucial function of encouraging people to tweet more, so they can get a dopamine hit from well-liked tweets.

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