Over twelve years posting on the internet for attention—and a decade of doing it professionally—I’ve thought constantly about why people react to certain posts and posters, and why they ignore the rest. I’ve dedicated nearly 100 episodes of
to talking to successful posters about what they do, yet I’m still no closer to the answer. Why do random accounts without specific beats or skillsets, say Paul Skallas or Mike Cernovich, rise to the top, while most of us languish in obscurity?The first thing brands, and most individuals, want in today’s world is to go viral, to gain followers, to be the center of the online conversation. Yet so rarely are they able to achieve it—at least on purpose—despite spending hundreds of billions of dollars trying.
This article pokes at the reasons why.
I’ve been hosting Twitter Spaces after the NFL playoff games. An odd form of media. Anyone can join, they remain anonymous besides their voice, but to participate they must request the microphone from the hosts. The result is a roving, freeform “conversation” very different from a real life one. There’s little back-and-forth, more serial soapboxing. People take turns bloviating. If conflict overwhelms the Space, a good host will use his “mute all” power and move on. Spaces are talk radio, democratized.
About 30-40 people join my Spaces at any given moment. Poor performance. Recently, my Twitter engagement has been throttled to a minimum, a result of designations that restrict controversial accounts, even in the Musk era.
Another reason my Twitter Spaces have so far failed is because I’m bad at hosting them. Successful Twitter Space hosting is a subtle art, a combination of talk radio host, stand up comic, and autistic shitposter. Anons Nightmare Vision and Future Moldovan Citizen produce one of the best nightly Spaces, called “Night Owls.” I wish I could tell you why they’re so good at, but I can’t grasp it myself.
However, after having one of the sharpest anons
on , he kindly joined one of my NFL Spaces. He’s a popular guest on Night Owls, an incisive commenter, and when he joined my less popular space, he elevated the conversation in a palpable way. It stoked my understanding of Spaces, of mimetic arts, and of posting and scrolling in general.As soon as he joined the space, Covfefe did something I’ve seen other top anons do. It’s hard to put into words. Up to that point, the conversation ran towards the normie. Listen to Bill Simmons’ weekly NFL pod with Cousin Sal, and you’ll know what I mean. The appeal is lazy, humorous relatability. Very male. Chewing the fat with your bros over beers. Shooting the shit. Blasting a heater or two. Light mockery blended with hyper-detailed knowledge of stats, plays, lineups, personalities. Your capital in such conversations (of which I have very little) comes from 1) how much minutiae you can bring to the table without sounding gay and 2) how mean you can be without seeming angry.
But what Covfefe did was a curveball, and it’s why he has the reputation he does. Instead of raising where, for example, the Ravens’ unsung second string tight end went to college, he brought up a different kind of minutiae. Addressing whether refs can rig games, he shared the complexities surrounding a little known rule nuance that allows offensive linemen, and therefore refs, a certain amount of leniency in the definition of False Start penalties if a lineman moves his back leg in a certain way. The mainstream rarely discusses the issue, which makes it all the more suspicious. But sure enough, if you dig, it’s there. He wasn’t just bringing something to the table, he was showing us how the table was made. This is what a good poster does best.
Covfefe offers scrollers their favorite currency—rare redpills. Listening to him, or reading his tweets, you drop out for a moment, thrilled at learning something fascinating, and not only fascinating but surprising in a way that burns holes in the perceived order.
I used to scoff at the idea that the internet made us any more informed, seeing it more as an instrument of control. But, I’ve recently accepted the novelty of the exponential increase of available information. Every medium has its message, and every message has a core emotional benefit for its audience. While in prior ages, mediums lent themselves to the emotions of inspiration, meaning, love, sadness, profundity, etc, the internet leads us to a different kind of satisfaction: the excitement that comes from gaining knowledge. It’s why “conspiracy theories” are central to our era. We crave redpills, because redpills are made to be swallowed.
This has a lot to do with mimesis, which large organizations, brands or otherwise, aren’t built to capture. They’re getting better at it, as we’ve seen with Brand Twitter, but the whole world of posting and scrolling is still highly opaque. With Covfefe in mind, I’ve mapped out what I think the different types of successful posters are, why people are drawn to them, and how they overlap. I call them:
Wrinkle Finders
Insight Miners
Gonzo Reporters
Parasocial Friends
Rise and Grinders
Beauty Promoters
The list is not in ranked order, as I believe that all categories play a vital role and that no one is inherently superior to any other. I admire them all. However, it does descend from the least accessible to normies, and thus the closest to the source of truth, down to most accessible.
Wrinkle Finders
Covfefe is primarily a Wrinkle Finder, as are most people on Frogtwitter, like the Night Owls guys, news digesters like
or , wordcels like Lomez or , noticers like Steve Sailer, , and Mena, and “people” like Paul Skallas. is a health Wrinkle Finder. is an art version. political theory. Video essayists like and (The Distributist) also fit the category. On Instagram, people like Brad Troemel do the Wrinkle Finding work. They’re our lovable spergs, the ones who actually do the reading.They find surprising pieces of information, weave them together into mimetic fabric, and transmit them as stimulating redpills like Green Line Theory, “new euphemism just dropped,” or Covfefe’s very own “the woke is more correct than the mainstream.” Understanding things feels good, and from Wrinkle Finders we get the core currency of the scroller—that “peek behind the curtain” feeling, the satisfaction of advanced learning from a special thinker. It’s no surprise that many of best Wrinkle Finders have roots in academia, as had academia not been destroyed by the left, they would likely be teaching in classrooms. Instead, they blow our minds on Twitter and YouTube.
Many try to become Wrinkle Finders because it looks easy—find a random subject, do a deep dive, post your findings. This is why you’ll stumble across seemingly random posts about, for example, migration patterns in historical Turkmenistan. It’s not actually random, it’s someone trying to Wrinkle Find—they want to make redpills themselves, a strange kind of pharma—and are hunting for golden threads in information systems to process.
But it’s a false perception. Great Wrinkle Finders are few and far between. They are, in my view, the most definitional posters of our time—where the meme cycle truly starts, even if most normies don’t know it. Moldbug is a Wrinkle Finder. Most of the neoreactionaries are; neoreaction is fundamentally a redpill position. It takes a certain magic to show up on a space about a random topic and interject that perfect fact that nobody knew, that makes you rethink everything.
Benefit: Factual Truth
Emotion: Excitement
Examples: , Paul Skallas, , Steve Sailer, The Distributist, , , , , Night Owls
Insight Miners
A close cousin to the Wrinkle Finders, Insight Miners are also in the truth business, but pack a more emotional punch. They’re the people who make the memes and write the essays. They refine the Wrinkle. Sol Brah is Insight Miner to BAP. Seed Oil Disrespector is an Insight Miner of Raw Egg Nationalist.
is an Insight Miner of Moldbug or The Distributist. to . They’re one step closer to the normie horde, but this doesn’t mean they’re any less important. In many ways, they’re more.Some of the best non-Twitter examples are accounts like MCM Wholesale or all the “ellectuals” accounts (Insight Miners to Brad Troemel) perhaps my favorite accounts on the entire internet for their unadulterated contempt for rootless urban culture.
Memes appeal to all kinds of audiences, blue collar boomers on Facebook love ‘em just as much as sensitive bois in Dimes Square. They’re the universal language. They work because they share insights, a marketing term for “universal truths.” Insights make us laugh, they make us cry, they anger or inspire. They’re like "wrinkles” because they’re naturally hidden or overlooked, a part of experience that we feel but don’t often articulate. And when brought to the surface, by a comedian on stage or by an Insight Miner on social media, we feel less alone. They have the potential to cause far more emotion than the raw redpills of the Wrinkle Finder.
Benefit: Emotional Truth
Emotion: Understanding
Examples: Mike Cernovich, MCM Wholesale, Seed Oil Disrepector, , Sol Brah
Gonzo Reporters
(SCHIZO_FREQ) got big because he successfully self-treated his hand after being bitten by a raccoon. by forcing ChatGPT to be racist. Med Gold and by sharing their real life experiences with women. his real life experiences as a tech founder. William Wheelwright from practicing “reactionary agriculture.”Like Wrinkle Finders, Gonzo Reporters do the work to unearth insights, only drawn from real world experience and experimentation instead of reading. To be an effective Gonzo Reporter you must report your findings with a “based,” that is to say brutally honest, perspective. I am one of these—all my work, even the branding/marketing stuff, relates back to lived experiences which I believe to be unique enough to warrant interest from the world. When I’m right, I go viral like with Vibecamp. More often, I’m wrong.
The problem with being a Gonzo Reporter is that, unlike other types of posters who spark instantaneous reactions in their target audiences, our stuff takes more time. It’s more like the reporting of old, and thus less well formatted for today. Too long a cycle for the scroller—you’ll be forgotten in no time. To remedy this, you must learn to shitpost effectively—as Delicious Tacos does so hilariously well—or, if you can’t do that, to podcasting, which is what I do. There’s also a subset of Gonzo Reporters, like Josh Lekach and Chaya Raichik (Libs of TikTok) who cross-post crazy videos they find on other platforms, which is always an effective method for keeping audiences engaged.
Benefit: Empirical Truth
Emotion: Adventure
Examples: SCHIZO_FREQ (Lukas), , Mike Ma, Giles Hoffman/Asylum Mag, , (Me), Josh Lekach, , William Wheelwright
Parasocial Friends
The NFL Space, before Covfefe showed up, was a Parasocial Friend space. Posters of this variety offer the feeling of friendship and relatability. Warmth. Good humor. Belonging. The vast majority of normie sports podcasts, like Bill Simmons, hit this same nerve, as do comedian podcasts like Shane Gillis or Rogan.
Hilarious reply guys like Howling Mutant, Perry Abbasi, and West Bestern define the Parasocial Friends category on Twitter. Humorist
also fits the mold. They’ve figured out a way to become comedians in the digital world; even if you’re not in the room shooting the shit with them, you feel like you are. hosts Maarek and Bog Beef, are also Parasocial Friends, although they mix in a lot of Wrinkle Finding too (Bog Beef famously identified the Patronage Cycle which is one of our most effective Wrinkle Finds yet). , famous for his voice and extremely long hangout sessions on Spaces, GCs, and on his podcast, is also a Parasocial Friend.Nothing has a more powerful effect on the average male human than humor. It’s the absolute trump card, which is why Parasocial Friends deserve the utmost respect, even if they are closer to the normie sphere. In a way, the closer to the mainstream you sit, the more powerful you need to be. You enter their little world for awhile, sit as a fly on the wall as they crack jokes that make you chuckle. When your brain is really tired, this is the kind of content we’re drawn to. A place to belong.
Benefit: Humor
Emotion: Belonging
Examples: Howling Mutant, Perry Abbasi, , Shane Gillis, , , West Bestern
Rise and Grinders
These are the guys who offer business advice, or the people who sell you copywriting courses or fitness programs on Twitter. There’s nothing wrong with this approach. They’re the most alpha among us, because they’re the least sensitive. They remind us to STFU and move forward. Vital leaders of the pack. The generals.
But, if you want to be one of them, you have to go to great lengths to say things differently and not be too much of a shill. Done well, like
or , their feeds balance of everything—humor, aspirational photos, redpills, memes—but always driving towards a singular goal. is a Rise and Grinder, as are the The BowTied accounts. And, of course, there’s Moon Brah.The folks who do this well post undeniable results, whether in the form of money, gains, or their creations. This category also has huge upside, as we’ve seen with normie Rise and Grinders like Patrick Bet-David, Lewis Howes, and many other examples.
But one note: if you are this type, you will be tempted to buy followers. DON’T DO IT.
Benefit: Motivation
Emotion: Inspiration
Examples: , , Patrick Bet David, Lewis Howes, BowTied Accounts, , Moon Brah/Bryan Johnson
Beauty Promoters
Finally, we have those true internet artists—aesthetics accounts. Whether they’re posting their art, their lives, their bodies, or simply their mood board desktop folders, their job is to make you feel something with curated imagery alone. Sometimes they work with AI, like
and his incredible Restoration Bureau project. Often its nostalgia, like with Cigarette Aesthetica or . Other times its just trains. But what they always share in common is 1) great taste and 2) a genuine desire to make the internet a more beautiful place.Benefit: Beauty
Emotion: Transcendence
Examples: Cigarette Aesthetica, , Alex Forrest, Appalachian Aesthetics
Few fit solely into any one category. Many listed above fit obviously in two or more categories, like Sol Brah (Insight Miner + Rise and Grinder) or Bog Beef (Wrinkle Finder + Parasocial Friend). Many great accounts are three of the five. BAP—maybe the best to ever do it—is Wrinkle Finder, Gonzo Reporter, and Beauty Promoter. REN is Wrinkle Finder, Beauty Promoter, and Insight Miner. Even Joe Rogan isn’t pure Parasocial Friend—he throws a lot of Wrinkle Finding into the mix.
However, a word of caution. Many accounts, none of which I will name, fit into none of these boxes. They don’t really offer any emotional benefits—they’ve risen to huge followings usually via endless hot takes about the political issue of the day. They’re “right place right time” people, benefitting from the rise of Twitter and 4chan etc as the only places to get real news, moreso than any unique skill or artistically crafted persona. These kinds of accounts always appear frustrated and annoyed, because they know their time is short.
People, like brands, need to be realistic not so much about the “stories they tell” (very Boomer), or even about “breaking the internet” (very Millennial). Longevity in scroller-world means participating productively in the information explosion. You need to add fuel to the fire. The Wrinkle Finders guide us—they’re the closest to mastering the form. Art always depends on truth in some way or another, but mimetic truth is a new and exciting substrate to build on, if you can wrap your head around it.
Imo, the secret to good posting is humor and/or sincerity
The peek behind the political curtain... I've been after such insights since Ulick Varange (Imperium) defined democracy as "the unhampered looting by finance capitalists" and E.M. Cioran (The Temptation to Exist) said "Are we but ham actors of wisdom and madness?" In the Trump era, I've noticed that "the go-to coping mechanism for the Republican base is violence." And... "The southern evangelical churches are front organizations for the Ku Klux Klan."