Francisco and I just released bangers! A website gathering the most insightful tweets from the TPOT community.
Bangers filters the 7 million posts in the Community Archive to surface the ones that have accumulated the most quotes each year since 2008, excluding quotes from the post author. This metric selects for tweets containing popular insights that got referenced by community members in many other contexts.
We built this website over a few days after coming up with the idea for the metric by playing with the data. It is easy to treat it as a small, scrappy experiment, shipped quickly to gather user feedback to iterate on future prototypes.
But I feel like this output should be treated with more respect. We pretend to distill an intellectual canon from years of distributed creative labor!
TPOT is also a community I have been intrigued by for the past months.
Its integration of rationalism with embodied practice and spirituality was an attractive pitch, as I became less convinced of the AI safety community’s potential to grow flourishing futures. Unfortunately, I am not a Twitter person. My attention prefers to flow in deep dives, following a calm rhythm, rather than piecemeal blocks of text coming and going in a feed. Bangers gave me a good format for being introduced to the community’s culture.
That is also to say that I am missing context and telling this story from an outside perspective. Here are notes from a short, humble journey through the most insightful tweets from the TPOT/post-rat community.
Nurturing the discourse.
TPOT is a nebulous concept standing for “This Part of Twitter”; that’s how nebulous it is. In one sentence, Otis’ guide describes it as “a group of people on Twitter who value curiosity, openness, earnestness, intelligence, kindness, and vulnerability.” Maybe one of its characteristics is a care for charitable online discourse.
The goal is for replies to listen to engage with the ideas of the original author, giving steam to a co-created thread. It’s treating online interactions like improv responding with “Yes, and …”, or “No, and …”. The aim of TPOT is to create a public online scene where vulnerability is welcome, and participants are (mostly) pro-social. The lightly held intention is for these scenes to be a Petri dish, to achieve critical mass and make the dominoes fall, reaching global impact.
Through replies and quotes, tweets form a web of thoughts that break free from the linearity of classic media like books or blogs. The community produces an incredible volume of text, concentrated in a few prolific accounts like @visakanv, which posted more than 250K tweets, and is omnipresent in the top-quoted tweets from Bangers. Its presence in the chart is a sign that its content was useful to other users (as quotes from the author are not counted), and is a fair signal from the community.
The fire metaphor.
This is a typical example of a nugget of insight that has been propagated across many contexts. It is a great reminder of the agency you have in deciding how deeply you’d like to delve into various situations, such as human relationships.
Humans are open systems.
This fire-distance agency is crucial because the fire you expose yourself to is shaping who you become. Deciding to move closer or further away from it, as well as which fire you decide to be close to, matters enormously. Humans are open systems, and their environment is the most important lever to change one’s life.
Making friends.
The Twitterverse became a prime space to befriend like-minded people. Over time, groups of online friends recognized how fertile their connections were and wanted to grow closer. The community progressively increased its agency (as defined by Rich below) by hosting larger, longer gatherings.
This started with VibeCamp, a few-day event held annually since 2022. It continued with the growth of Fractal in New York and Portal in Porto: members are now bringing the lively scene they created on Twitter into vibrant neighborhoods through their community-run buildings.
Departing thoughts.
This is an inspiring story for an online community. It is unclear if the strength is strong enough to make the next domino fall yet, but it is a quest worth pursuing.
And an obvious disclaimer: this introduction didn’t do justice to the richness of TPOT’s cultural production. You can explore it yourself on bangers!
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