5 Comments
Jan 29, 2023Liked by Crystal Duan

I was literally introduced to tpot this year (2023) by a coaching client of mine who said I was tpot or tpot-adjacent, but I didn't know what it was lol. But when I looked it up, I knew Visa would eventually be part of it, and I was right. I've been on the Visa train for a while and a growing Crystal fan too! Anyway, this is a good primer and I'm now ready to officially consider myself in tpot.

Expand full comment
author

WELCOME, JASON, WELCOME!

Expand full comment
Comment removed
Expand full comment

Hi Anonymous, your reply is exactly what we discourage in tpot. I suggest reading the Twitter thread Crystal put in the middle of her essay (relinked below). It's a good primer for explaining what a "good reply" looks like, which is probably why Crystal put it there to pre-empt this encounter

https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1039420186586038273

Consider changing your message to comment on what seems cringe to you, and why that's an issue to you (maybe you want this essay to sound cooler to other online people when you link this page in your weekly ILoveTpot newsletter). If you see nothing wrong with your message, then just be aware that many online spaces like this one are not the right place to troll and shit-post. Try finding a subreddit or Discord for that, and everyone (including you) will be happier

Expand full comment
RemovedDec 22, 2022·edited Dec 22, 2022
Comment removed
Expand full comment

I appreciate you elaborating. This is actually pretty cool to think about, since these are good topics the community should be discussing

> I wasn't trying to start a conversation

Interestingly, that's not a requirement for online discourse. I once replied to a 2-year old post on a Power BI forum about where a particular option had moved to a different menu, mainly for myself when I look it up later. People make comments online to commune with others, or their future self, or their fans, or their customers, or all sorts of wacky objectives

> This social circle is the most perfect example I've ever seen of how communities with high civility norms get completely subverted and destroyed by sociopathic normie entryists like you. [...] If people like OP can post this kind of insane blog without receiving criticism, the "community" is already a carcass.

I +1 this critique, which I think more people should be saying. Any community with a gray-area, fuzzy definition is going to be easier for people to step into and out of. So it's more vulnerable to exploit by malicious agents/grifters or absorption/coercion into some bigger concept. "tpot" is vague enough to be assigned pretty much any quality people want, like a Rorschach test. We should probably have some hard facts about what is a good description and what is just wishful thinking. Pointing out more specific boundaries would be a fruitful idea for someone to write about (maybe in response to the very blog post we're reading)

> There's no polite way to point out, for example, that visakanv is a grifter who farms attention on twitter to sell more copies of his book.

It's fine to be impolite. People writing aggressively online is often pretty fun to read. It has an authentic energy that you can sniff-test for sincerity or fakers. I don't agree with this critique, but I can understand why you might view visakanv as a grifter. He has a paywall to some of his content and a main-character energy. But I don't see this as a bad thing. People who write ideas online are either trying to draw attention to themselves or to the ideas. Often, there's overlap. If the ideas are good, I'm willing to try to understand them, and their persona-driven way of presenting their ideas. Usually presentations cost money though, because paying for content incentivizes more of it

Expand full comment

You killed him with kindness ahahah

Expand full comment