The northlondonhippy

I really did it, I spent the bet­ter part of yes­ter­day try­ing to do good deeds on Twitter.

So how’d I do?

Well, I wouldn’t call it an unqual­i­fied suc­cess, but I wouldn’t count it as a fail­ure either. I was able to give some gen­uine help to a hand­ful of peo­ple, but I do feel like I could have done a lot more.

The hard­est part was find­ing peo­ple in need of gen­uine help. I started by search­ing my own stream, ie peo­ple I fol­low, for ques­tions or pleas for help — there weren’t many at all. So I switched to the pub­lic time­line and searched for “help me”.

Turns out, the only help most peo­ple on Twit­ter seek, falls into three categories:

- Help me get more fol­low­ers
– Help me to get Justin Bieber to fol­low me
– Help me to get Miley Cyrus to fol­low me

I couldn’t help with any of those things, even if I tried. What this meant in real terms was that using the pub­lic time­line to find peo­ple in real need was like search­ing the prover­bial haystack for the prover­bial nee­dle, and I don’t even shoot-up. I had to wade through lit­er­ally thou­sands of tweets just to find one that was genuine.

So what did I actu­ally help with? Here’s a rough list:

- I re-assured some­one who was fright­ened by stormy weather
– I rec­om­mended the best places for a day of shop­ping in Lon­don
– I helped some­one trou­bleshoot an iPhone/Twitter app
– I pro­vided advice to some­one look­ing to adver­tise adult edu­ca­tion courses in the media
– I wel­comed a new user to Twit­ter and gave them some basic advice

That’s just the high­lights, I also retweeted loads of other people’s tweets and exchanged friendly tweets with loads of other peo­ple, includ­ing some I fol­low and some I don’t. Many of my #help­ful­hippy tweets went ignored, but that’s to be expected. Peo­ple are not accus­tom to strangers offer­ing assis­tance with­out ulte­rior motives, espe­cially online.

Over­all, I found the entire expe­ri­ence pro­vided me with a weird mix of frus­tra­tion and sat­is­fac­tion, much like real life. I was frus­trated at how dif­fi­cult it was to locate peo­ple I could help, but found it very sat­is­fy­ing when I was actu­ally able to, in a very small way, make a dif­fer­ence to someone’s life.

I’ve come away from the day with the desire, not to do a #help­ful­hippy day again, but to include this gen­uinely help­ful approach into my life online on a more reg­u­lar basis. It cost me noth­ing to help out strangers, my knowl­edge is free, so is my time fre­quently, so why not try to give some­thing back all the time?

Life is indeed incred­i­bly bleak, dreary and point­less, but it doesn’t take much to occa­sion­ally make it into some­thing more, even in almost imper­cep­ti­bly small ways. It felt good help­ing strangers and I’m going to try to do it more often.

So if there’s ever any­thing I can do online to help you, just ask. I might sur­prise you with the per­fect answer. Or not.