Sean Kaye

I talk about growing side hustles while working full-time | Building side hustle businesses for 20+ years | I share details about my side hustle experiments 🧪

[Sean Kaye @SeanDoesLife]

You should be writing longer form tweets.

Period.

I'm not going to be one of those Twitter Bros with my 850-person account telling you how to grow to be massive, but here's what I've seen.

Let me explain...

@pauldm tagged me in a comment and asked what I'd seen, so I started writing out my thoughts and rationale as to why I started going down this path.

First off, I hate threads.

I think the UX is janky as both a reader and someone writing them. I find the constant breaks distracting and disjointed.

Your entire writing style tends to change because you're trying to hook and lead the reader in EVERY individual tweet so that they keep reading.

So, I don't like reading them and I don't like writing them, and that's the #1 reason I avoid them.

Plus, I'm verbose, so I like writing longer form.

Now, before I get into any of this, remember, my account is "petite" - it's at 860ish people and was at 325 when I started experimenting with longer-form tweets. Take that into consideration - small sample size.

Back in April, I noticed that if I wrote more than 280 characters and people clicked the "Show More" link to read the entire tweet, I got more impressions.

That's the genesis of it.

I didn't need any advanced calculus to work it out - writing more, telling a longer story, people who were interested clicked "Show More" and Twitter showed the whole tweet to more people it seemed.

My hypothesis was that it was what I called "Dwell Time" - the more people read my single tweets, the more "value" Twitter seemed to place on it.

Sort of like a silent engagement signal.

Obviously clicking on the "Show More" link was proper engagement signal to Twitter that people were interested in what I was writing, so no real need to explain that.

This is where I think it gets more interesting.

Then I put on my nerd hat and realized that from purely a "cost of compute" resources, it would be cheaper for Twitter to show long-form posts rather than threads in terms of calls to their data and presentation servers.

Based on that, I had a hunch a month ago that we'd see threads be pushed down the "algorithmic ranking signals" in favour of longer-form tweets because it's cheaper for Twitter AND it means people dwell on a tweet long.

Longer dwell time is more likely to result in some kind of engagement happening - a like, a retweet, or hopefully a reply.

I think replies are the magic "GO" button - why do I think that?

What is Twitter going to pay creators out for?

Ads displayed in the comments on a post.

They are financially rewarding you for having people comment on your stuff - I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that this is probably a strong signal that Twitter values this.

So as a strategy to complement that, I started replying to almost everything on my tweets - again, being a small account makes that easy, but I actively did it and I told people I was doing it.

That creates more conversation, etc...

My account had tripled in size off a small base, my tweets will easily get over 1m impressions this month in total, and considering that I went from about 350 followers a month ago to 860something today, that's a fair amount of impressions.

The content is the content - it obviously plays a big role, but the strategy for that was pretty simple:

"Say the shit out loud that other people are thinking but are too shy or unwilling to say because they don't want the blowback."

I decided to just be honest.

People talk about "being authentic" and then write rubbish platitudes.

I shit post and toss out contrarian views.

I don't care if people like me or not.

I don't care if people agree with me or not.

I wanted to have fun and say what was on my mind while pointing out the absurdity of a lot of what I was seeing based on nearly 20 years of doing stuff like this.

Seems to be resonating with other people, who knows.

I'd like to say I sat down and mapped this all out, but I didn't - most of it came to me while I was standing in the sun, out for a walk, lifting weights, or sitting on the toilet - the places where I do my best thinking.

And without being egotistical at all, I think I have a pretty decent grasp of human psychology, so I tend to know what buttons to press.

In summary, why do I think that long-form content is working for me?

It's a confluence of things.

It's tactics.

It's strategy.

It's understanding people.

It's being willing to call bullshit on things in a fun way without being a crass asshat.

And most importantly, it's being willing to try things and see how they work.

This is working, you should try it if you're interested.

Or don't. I don't care. Keep writing threads.

[Sean Kaye @SeanDoesLife]

@scottjduffy @HwoodScrptReadr I wrote a TV Series / Podcast this year in the form of a book.

Absolutely zero expectation of ever monetizing it.

If I can turn it into a live action series at a high quality and stick it on YT, I will absolutely do it.

It’s good, if I do say so myself.

Hollywood is cooked.

[Sean Kaye @SeanDoesLife]

Terrible week for Anthropic that could get even worse.

The whole thing with Peter Steinberger going to OpenAI was just a bad look.

If Hegseth deems them a “Supply Chain Risk” as is being threatened, that’s basically a death sentence for the company.

Amodei should stop staring into his own navel on podcasts and waxing philosophically and start running his company better.

[Sean Kaye @SeanDoesLife]

@scottjduffy @Simon_Ingari One person I know got a signing bonus as his new job big enough to surpass his lost LTI’s.

[Sean Kaye @SeanDoesLife]

I have a similar framework for looking at conspiracy theories now.

I assume it's true and place scrutiny on the claims made to disprove it. If the attacking claims withstand scrutiny, then you can proceed to evaluate the theory against the counterclaim.

That said, any idea that's just stochastic gibberish, I discount out of hand until I see it clarified.

[Sean Kaye @SeanDoesLife]

@BenSettle @stefaniasettle I'd be afraid of saying that to a Latinx woman.

[Sean Kaye @SeanDoesLife]

I build actual things with AI every day.

It's simultaneously overhyped and underrated.

I've done high-end technology for decades - I built one of the first wide-scale dial-up internet services in 1993, was a beta test for Microsoft .Net, I was an early customer of AWS EC2 & S3 in late-2006, was building SaaS products around that time...

I've been at the edge of every tech trend for the last over 30 years.

AI scares me. Legitimately. Our understanding of market economics is not prepared for it. It is the most value-destructive force I've ever thought possible short of some kind of cataclysmic natural event.

Anyone who asks, I tell them to hoard cash like toilet paper in early 2020.

[Sean Kaye @SeanDoesLife]

@scottjduffy @Simon_Ingari Two people I know, both VP level to be fair, just had to work out their 90-day notice periods.

[Sean Kaye @SeanDoesLife]

@scottjduffy If you're anything like me you spend your time wondering which tool to use.

[Sean Kaye @SeanDoesLife]

@BenSettle The only people mad about this are the usual suspects.

I was married for 10 years before she was even born. I now feel old.

[Sean Kaye @SeanDoesLife]

Been sorting through this Opus 4.6 token consumption issue for the last few days.

I'm finding that it desperately wants to read your entire codebase before going into planning mode and then reads MORE of the codebase after.

It's the single area where I'm seeing tokens burn - reading the codebase and looking at unnecessary elements.

[Sean Kaye @SeanDoesLife]

@glennwrites1 @AuthorGFAllen And further to that, if you write a lot and then read back what you’ve written out loud, your writing improves astronomically.

[Sean Kaye @SeanDoesLife]

@WiFiMoneyGuy A year ago, he was telling people to be reply guys on Twitter for money.

Why would anyone take serious technology advice from him?

Nice guy, very keen, but he’s an online marketer.

[Sean Kaye @SeanDoesLife]

@scottjduffy @venturetwins I know of multiple Fortune 500 company CIOs asking questions about ServiceNow, Workday, etc.

[Sean Kaye @SeanDoesLife]

I would be willing to test that theory if you could spot me a billion or so.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Whoever said “money can’t buy happiness” really knew what they were talking about 😔

[Sean Kaye @SeanDoesLife]

After a full day of using Claude Code with Opus 4.6, the difference feels minimal.

Opus 4.5 was already great.

But man, 4.6 chugs tokens. My Claude Max account copped a beating today.

[Sean Kaye @SeanDoesLife]

I agree. At some point this year, agent orchestration will become standard.

I have built a health assistant project in Claude that I chat with and give data to during the day.

It identified I was having trouble getting good sleep if I was working on things “late” and it asked if I wanted it to setup an Apple Reminder at 10:30pm for me to wind down.

I didn’t even know it had access to that. LOL.

[Sean Kaye @SeanDoesLife]

I love Claude.

I spend a lot of time every day in Claude Code for work.

Yesterday I saw some IAC done using Clawdbot at a client.

Environment variables hardcoded into the Terraform.

No tests. None.

The internet is going to be a zoo in the next 6 months.

[Sean Kaye @SeanDoesLife]

@GaelBreton I think if you’ve invested in building your systems and workflows around Claude Code, changing the Codex would be marginal gain.

I’d rather just hammer nails than try every hammer at the hardware store if I already have a great hammer.

[Sean Kaye @SeanDoesLife]

@SahilBloom @BillAckman People who fall for this stuff have an exceptional low directional IQ on the topic.

He can be as smart as you like but on this topic, he’s simply out of his depth and everything looks like sorcery.

[Sean Kaye @SeanDoesLife]

@BenSettle You sir, have the lobes.

[Sean Kaye @SeanDoesLife]

@FindJimClair It actually holds up well through a few seasons as well. But yeah, it’s not The Sopranos.

One show I did like that I watched this week is “Paradise”. It was surprisingly good.