HBD Twitter is Entirely r-selected

Extreme frequency is rewarded, original work is not

Say you are a poster on HBD twitter and you want to make a living off of it. What is your optimal content strategy? Should you frequently post existing IQ data 5 times a day or do original research, posting the results, say, once weekly? What do followers reward more — quality or quantity? In r/K selection theory lingo, are the life strategies of HBD twitter accounts fast, or slow?

Spoiler, they’re extremely fast. The absolute number of tweets you have explains almost 70% of the variance of followers (p < 0.001). In contrast, engagement (p < 0.01) and engagement rate (p < 0.05) predict only 42% and 32% of the variance respectively.

How much can we predict with multiple metrics? Account age adds nothing on top of number of tweets:

What about tweet frequency?

It adds about 8%.

How about engagement?

Engagement (average likes) literally adds nothing on top of total number of tweets! This suggests no differences due to content quality among accounts over 1000 followers in the HBD sphere.

What about engagement rate?

It adds maybe 4%.

Now let’s try engagement rate on top of tweet amount + frequency:

Adds basically nothing.

TLDR if YOU want to be the next HBD twitter account, try posting existing data extremely frequently. The market hardly rewards original research / K selected content.