Finding your tribe
Facebook, Twitter, OnlyFans, HackerNews, etc. all garner different sorts of communities that provide value in different sorts of ways.
Facebook initially helped me reach friends online for homework/learning about clubs/staying in the loop with school and friends. Instagram incentivized me to flash off what I was doing to look cool. But overtime (in the span of 2 years from freshman to junior year) I realized even though these platforms helped me discover hackathons and stay up to date with friends/homework/group projects; the horrible incentive structure to flash off + play status games was going to rot my mind soon. Combined with the fact that I couldn’t fit in with my HS, I left FB/Instagram and hopped on HackerNews and Twitter.
Its weird saying “oh I went from one social media platform to another” but its true: I was very precautious what I was getting myself into, since all the things people like Paul Graham and Sahil sounded too good to be true; but after spending the same amount of time I have on Twitter as I have on FB at this point, I’ve gained at least 1000x career-wise in value and has forever changed my trajectory in life. Since Twitter (despite looking horrible from the outside) is all about getting to know and following interesting random people, not just signaling to the rest of the 300 kids who you grew up with since elementary school that you got a arts and crafts internship at Facebook.
I checked back in to see how my “friends” were doing recently; I think they’ve fallen in to the Linkedin trap of FANG (they’re trying to get in, but I see one works at Prudential I think and the others aren’t doing anything) and fake research (I believe most AI research done in the undergraduate level is just changing hyperparameters around… at least for now).
In hindsight, I’m glad the vice principal who tried to suspend me for running a bash script and all the other people who pushed me away, forced me to find another avenue of finding a tribe; and I think with GZM and the larger community that includes (but not limited to) Twitter that I’ve gotten to know is just it, but not the end. Lets see if/when I drop out and move 40 minutes north to SF.