The walking -> happy life tweet is basically perfect. There's nothing you could add or subtract to make it any better, "Is this some kind of joke" is a great way to communicate a sentiment without having to talk about your sentiment "I feel that...", and it even looks visually like a poem with the parallel "Is th..." at the start of each line. Its popularity is not unreasonable.
And I don't think that most people can write perfect tweets without thinking hard. If someone practices writing (like you) or tweeting (like Eigen who has 150k+ tweets) for a long time and pays attention to how successful tweets are phrased and how little changes in punctuation or word choice affect how it reads, eventually they will start writing great tweets without "thinking hard" because their implicit model of great tweet is too big to be comprehended consciously and they just "see" it. But beginners, especially your presumed audience for this post of people who hate tweeting, should probably put more thought into their tweets as opposed to less until they git gud.
so we've covered this on twitter but i thought i'd mention here -- i understand that there's a skill curve, and i did provide some rules in this post, so i'm not in favor of no guidelines necessarily, just a minimal set combined with some fucking around -- a high-feedback environment like twitter rewards playful experimentation, and i think almost anyone is better at whatever level of creative expression if they're not cramped up and paralyzingly self-conscious!
The walking -> happy life tweet is basically perfect. There's nothing you could add or subtract to make it any better, "Is this some kind of joke" is a great way to communicate a sentiment without having to talk about your sentiment "I feel that...", and it even looks visually like a poem with the parallel "Is th..." at the start of each line. Its popularity is not unreasonable.
And I don't think that most people can write perfect tweets without thinking hard. If someone practices writing (like you) or tweeting (like Eigen who has 150k+ tweets) for a long time and pays attention to how successful tweets are phrased and how little changes in punctuation or word choice affect how it reads, eventually they will start writing great tweets without "thinking hard" because their implicit model of great tweet is too big to be comprehended consciously and they just "see" it. But beginners, especially your presumed audience for this post of people who hate tweeting, should probably put more thought into their tweets as opposed to less until they git gud.
so we've covered this on twitter but i thought i'd mention here -- i understand that there's a skill curve, and i did provide some rules in this post, so i'm not in favor of no guidelines necessarily, just a minimal set combined with some fucking around -- a high-feedback environment like twitter rewards playful experimentation, and i think almost anyone is better at whatever level of creative expression if they're not cramped up and paralyzingly self-conscious!