This is not a rhetorical question.
I was doing some random data analysis today. I downloaded an archive of all my tweets, and of all my blog posts, and was looking at some simple statistics. I won’t bore you with a lot of the mundane details.
One thing that I must mention is that the hypothesis that twitter activity has an adverse impact on my blogging is disproved. I was looking at the number of words I’ve put on twitter each week and the number of words I’ve blogged in the same week. The two are uncorrelated.
In any case, so far I’ve tweeted 60,716 tweets over the course of eleven and a half years. My tweets include at total of 992453 words. Ignoring other handles, links and punctuation, maybe we can round this down to 950000. In other words, in nine and a half years I’ve tweeted nine and a half hundred thousand words.
Or that on twitter alone I write a hundred thousand words a year.
The content of my book was about 52,000 words (IIRC). In other words, I write enough content for two books EACH YEAR on twitter. In 2013, I tweeted nearly four books worth of content.
That, however, is not the only reason why I wonder if I should tweet at all. While I’ve discovered a lot of interesting people, and made interesting connections, and can “semi-keep-in-touch” with people through twitter, I’m not really sure about the “impact” of my tweets.
I thought I’ll look at the tweets that have been most retweeted.
| full_text | Date | retweet_count | favorite_count | Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Why does the government / ruling party put out tweets with basic arithmetic errors? ?14.98+?9.02 is ?24 not ?27.44 https://t.co/oFaBNDYgpc | 2017-09-19 | 350 | 416 | https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/910122027306164229 |
| Remember that Richter scale is logarithmic. Base 10 if I’m not wrong. So 7.7 is 10 times as bad as 6.7 | 2015-04-25 | 171 | 40 | https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/591858524147175425 |
| Our @uber driver tonight was one Mr Akmal. He dropped us successfully. | 2017-12-24 | 148 | 312 | https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/944964502071623681 |
| The greatest Hindi movie about Rajputs is Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na | 2017-11-24 | 142 | 299 | https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/934173502281801730 |
| Based on interim data, in 17 states NOTA has got more votes than AAP. #MintElections #MeaninglessComparisons http://t.co/LxZvtNme1P | 2014-05-16 | 134 | 19 | https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/467242247965007872 |
| A whopping 332 out of 542 constituencies in the just-concluded General Elections saw a two-way contest. Another 184 saw three-way contests.
In contrast, in the 2014 elections only 169 two-way contests, 278 three-cornered contests and 90 four-cornered contests |
2019-05-24 | 95 | 174 | https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/1131912762357981184 |
| “these dark days” is a euphemism for “people I didn’t vote for have formed the government” | 2019-12-19 | 69 | 242 | https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/1207659817579335681 |
| I have built this app that recommends single malt whiskies based on what you already like.
https://t.co/B4PqxjUQI2 Details here: https://t.co/kc3yG1mx2o |
2018-11-02 | 56 | 202 | https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/1058347106438705153 |
| Amazing number of commies on this list RT @suar4sure: “@BookLuster: Which dictator killed the most People? http://t.co/WlJDLAiMAn” | 2014-07-23 | 44 | 13 | https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/491876757176188928 |
| If BJP hadn’t split, numbers would have been: Cong: 91, BJP: 86, JDS: 35 @gkjohn | 2013-05-08 | 39 | 3 | https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/332065593660407810 |
| Today @moneycontrolcom / @CNNnews18 have unleashed a monstrosity of a map. The map explains nothing, and nothing can explain the map!
https://t.co/VOooy26Ra2 |
2019-02-21 | 36 | 80 | https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/1098577156198805504 |
| Stud thread https://t.co/gvuZIjV71I | 2018-07-22 | 34 | 105 | https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/1021130139290226688 |
| there’s one piece of @ShashiTharoor ‘s writing that I’ve read multiple times – his blurb for my book. When I first read it, I was amazed at how precisely it communicated the idea of my book – much better than I’d ever managed to do. https://t.co/Lz2I9ZwW0L | 2017-12-14 | 33 | 138 | https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/941357298840059904 |
| Did you know the cube root law of assembly size?
It’s a heuristic that states that the optimal size of a national assembly is the cube root of the population |
2019-12-13 | 27 | 80 | https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/1205408450810798080 |
| Great piece by Dheeraj Sanghi on the expulsion of students from IIT Roorkee: http://t.co/uxPduX680z | 2015-07-12 | 27 | 11 | https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/620138692762415104 |
| did the Chinese workers use One Belt to beat up the police, and then escape on One Road? https://t.co/7lldCWrpxq | 2018-04-05 | 26 | 98 | https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/981886501456924672 |
| I don’t know why people don’t get that a non-zero number that ends in zero is even.
This is absolutely bizarre https://t.co/fpZQB24l0a |
2015-12-07 | 26 | 13 | https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/673831614581899264 |
| the one thing AAP has succeeded in doing is to tremendously increase my respect for LokSatta and @JP_LOKSATTA http://t.co/8hjA5l8IKN | 2014-05-14 | 25 | 16 | https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/466432370296762368 |
| Coffee truck at avenue road. By coffee board voluntarily retired employees association. Brilliant coffee. Ten bucks. http://t.co/rBOgRh1F2l | 2013-07-11 | 24 | 6 | https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/355201588505223170 |
| And I present you the way the parliamentary constituencies in Bangalore are demarcated
https://t.co/1tcGCimdG9 https://t.co/8QPIOzajN4 |
2019-03-26 | 24 | 59 | https://twitter.com/karthiks/status/1110574864803323905 |
Till date, I’ve had FIVE tweets with more than a hundred retweets. I’ve had ELEVEN tweets with more than a hundred likes (including one where I’ve simply said “stud thread” and then linked to a thread written by someone else).
In other words, while I might have four thousand odd followers, the amplification of my tweets is rather minimal.
So maybe I should not tweet at all? And instead devote the time and effort spent in tweeting to other means? Maybe write another book instead?
What do you think?