To Find Out If Something’s Good, Search For Posts From Your Internet Friends

You keep hearing about a certain TV show or podcast or video game. Should you try it out, is it for you, what’s its deal? You could watch trailers and see the best bits, or read about it on Wikipedia and IMDb and learn nothing about what it’s actually like. Or you could check what your friends are saying about it online.

this website kicks ass if you only wanna like shit for three weeks. if you’re okay with the month not even changing before freelance 10k follower guys are like “actually old town road and keanu suck” you’ll thrive on here.

— Andrew Durso (@andrew_durso) June 7, 2019

Writer and artist Austin Kleon recommends searching for tweets from people you follow. Search a term from Twitter’s front page, then under ‘Search Filters’ on the results page, change ‘From anyone’ to ‘People you follow’. (You might have to click ‘Show’ to reveal the full menu.)

You’ll get a bunch of thoughts and opinions about a show, an artist, or a band, from people whose thoughts and opinions you care about. And also from people you politely follow out of a sense of obligation.

You can run a similar search on Facebook. Search a term, then select the ‘Posts’ tab, and by default you’ll see ‘Posts from Friends’ first. Now you know what all your aunts think of something.

The babies love themselves some Old Town Road, boy. It really is the new baby shark. Play that guitar riff and the kids go crazy.

— Bree Newsome Bass (@BreeNewsome) June 6, 2019

This is also useful for testing the prevailing winds before expressing a strong opinion. For instance, I think a certain Netflix show that stole the premise of Groundhog Day was fun but in the end mediocre.

I know, I’m very brave. But I will not admit this on Twitter, where it’s clear that the show meant a lot to people, and where there’s really no need for me to shout my personal opinion. Perhaps the lesson is to never tweet! It is. But I will not stop tweeting, so I need this search technique instead.

my young ones were clowning Kidz Bop today because apparently they have a version of Old Town Road and changed the line to ‘Wrangler on my Tee Vee’

— Saladin Ahmed (@saladinahmed) June 7, 2019

A few tweets won’t tell you everything about a piece of entertainment, but they’ll fill in the gaps of more comprehensive but bloodless descriptions. They tell you what people think of that thing, how long they’ve known about it, how they fit it into the rest of the culture. Look at the tweets in this post.

They’re not just about ‘Old Town Road’, but about Kidz Bop and violent country music and ‘Baby Shark’ and Keanu Reeves and the internet’s ability to get you all excited about something, and then crush your spirit.

Old Town Road is about enjoying a lovely day with your horse. Conversely, Marty Robins’ classic “El Paso” is about getting so horny that you kill a dude for talking to a girl you know

— Dan Sheehan (@ItsDanSheehan) June 2, 2019

So see what everyone’s saying about your favourite stuff now, before it’s canceled.