Pre-2022, there was a platform-centric prestige attached to being famous on Twitter and dread towards the important distinction of inadvertently becoming a ‘main character’, the difference being a matter of whether the fame was chosen or not.
A kind of semi-ironic nobility was attached to consistently providing humorous tweets in a distinct voice or ‘sh**posting’, like the absurdist humor of canonized Twitter poster Dril, or similar, remaining unmonetized unless a user achieved enough exposure to sell merch or swing a book deal.
However, God forbid anybody, renowned or not, share an opinion or experience that a vocal minority could take issue with. As a 2019 tweet by @maplec*caine explained, “Each day on Twitter there is one main character. The goal is to never be it.” A viral tweet offered the world’s most miserable screen addicts a couple of days of juicy material, a competition “to win some non-existent prize by posting the most incisive commentary on a stranger,” as summarized by Vice journalist Samantha Cole.
The concept of the main character was one of the first things to come under scrutiny after Elon Musk acquired the platform and renamed it X two and a half years ago. The blue check mark, once a somewhat exclusive club used to verify the accounts of celebrities, politicians, and journalists became something that anybody could acquire, for a price. In return, there are extra benefits offered—one of the most attractive being that people can make money from engagement with their tweets.
Having “made the implicit social consequences of being a Twitter main character explicit,” as Ryan Broderick puts it in his newsletter Garbage Day, complaints have arisen about these changes encouraging a race to flood the site with even worse content than before. Daily, a swarm of bluetick accounts attempts to generate an income through reposting slop content and cooking up deliberately inflammatory takes.
At the same time, the site that nobody wants to call X has also seemed to produce an unintended, higher-quality side effect. For a minority, the main character label has been mixed with the sh**poster spirit to create a persona that, controversies permitting, appears to rise above the average bottom-of-the-barrel clout fishing.
One of the first entrants in the post-X celebrity hall of fame is Derek Guy, known by his handle @dieworkwear or simply as “the menswear guy.” For reasons unknown to himself and everybody else, Guy became a darling of another Musk-led innovation. In early 2023, the For You tab was the feed that every user’s account began to default to, showing them a mixture of tweets from those they followed and those that the algorithm decided they would be interested in (as opposed to the classic feed that only showed tweets from those that they followed).
As his nickname suggests, Guy’s account has a singular focus on men’s fashion that has proved a versatile and surprising hit after the initial bafflement at his algorithmic favoring faded.
One side of his content is fairly innocuous, such as providing advisory threads on how men should wear and shop for clothes. The rest is more acerbic, including style-related putdowns and meticulously thought-out arguments directed at everyone from controversial figures like Andrew Tate or Dave Portnoy to random Twitter users challenging his expertise.
“Fashion is a language,” Guy told GQ in an interview puzzling over his sudden popularity. “Instead of trying to dictate to men how to dress, I try to instill in them that there's a language in dress.”
One of the few personalities to be considered a worthy comparison to “menswear guy” is Dr. Ally Louks, holding a PhD in English Literature from the University of Cambridge. Her path toward platform-based stardom was a little rockier, stemming from a more traditional, inflammatory Main Character pathway.
In November 2024, she made a post celebrating that her doctoral thesis “Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose” had been approved with no corrections. A contingent of anti-woke users made the post go viral, criticizing its focus on smell as a way to express certain social prejudices.
Despite fierce opposition, which included personal threats, Louks won over a large portion of Twitter with an unrelenting and unapologetic defense of her ideas. She even encouraged many to find examples that her work was related to in the form of tweets.
“I’m open to criticism, so long as it’s based in reality,” she claimed in a BBC interview about her experience. Louks happily capitalized on the trend she inspired, contributing further analysis to many of the posts that were brought to her attention.
Many have drawn comparisons to the two champion posters, usually in admiration of their similarly exacting and incisive analytical abilities in their chosen fields. Their audience has noted how they express themselves using the long-vaunted Twitter skill of “posting,” an ambiguous concept that diverges slightly from the sh**tpost and is best summed up as having a strong and consistent voice combined with the insight to dunk on people, i.e. win internet arguments. Some have even called for them to be on a podcast together.
The pair certainly have a similar formula of laser focusing on a narrow area with surprising reach and keeping a mostly unflappable attitude towards those who challenge them. More than that, though, they also offer an antidote to a site overwhelmed by drop shipping ads and promoted tweets espousing unpleasant political views. On a site where a stunning amount of individuals make a claim to being a know-it-all, having the understanding and the constitution to back it up is a power move.
Notoriety doesn’t come without its drawbacks on a platform that is renowned for its animosity. According to Samantha Cole, avoiding falling for a “Milkshake Duck,” an individual who goes viral and is then revealed to be problematic in some way, is just as important as winning an imaginary battle of intellect.
Both personalities have had their detractors since their rise to fame. Guy is frequently condemned for having a persnickety public persona that is opportunistic to the point of annoyance in its criticism.
Louks, meanwhile, apologized and took a social media break recently after being accused of misogynoir for objecting to people saying that Indian people “stink” after an Indian woman posted a video that some interpreted as being anti-black.
This kind of Twitter celebrity may have increased resilience thanks to their unparalleled know-how and a willingness to entertain the masses as they square up with their critics, but nobody is ever granted infallibility in the land where tweeting about liking pancakes must mean that you hate waffles. Internet fame is just as bound to the conditions of its existence as the old-school kind.
As more people seek to be compensated for existing online and AI continues to dampen the credibility of the Internet as a place of autonomous discovery, there is increasing value in using social media to share a specific calling. Dedication to a true niche has always been in short supply on Twitter, not least in balance with a virality-friendly voice. In a sea of dumbness, people crave the safe harbor of the expert.