Update 11/23: Never posted this thread, oh well! You can still read it here, though. That said, I have been tweeting more :)
I am a strong female voice in tech. There are many things I want to share, but so far I’ve mostly avoided sharing them on Twitter. Until now. Probably. This is a thread about that. 1/N
My hesitations around using Twitter to express myself beyond relatively benign link shares and development commentary are: 2/N
1) The energy I would spend interacting on Twitter could be spent on things that objectively have more tangible and lasting impact e.g. side projects, blog posts, community organizing. It’s not necessarily a 1:1 comparison, but still. 3/N
2) Thoughts and opinions change, tweets do not. This causes me to spend significant effort authoring tweets, and often not sending them at all. Twitter does not deserve this much attention. My blog does. 4/N
3) I will be tweeting to an unmanageable amount of followers (where manageable = having a good idea of who your followers are). This means there will be trolls and spam and generally unsupportive commenters who will criticize without taking time to understand. Until I’ve built up some armor, those criticisms will be painful. 5/N
4) Most of all, I am afraid of sounding too confident or self-righteous, and sabotaging progress I’ve made in developing my tech platform/persona at real life events. 6/N
This last concern – maybe the others, too, but #4 specifically – is a result of THE PATRIARCHY. Twitter, by design, is a place for self-righteousness and over-confidence. Why can’t I contribute to that? 7/N
I am awesome, and I am going to start tweeting, for real. Probably. 8/N