What I’ve Learned From Four Years of Open DMs

My Twitter DMs are open, and I will respond. I’m a comedian, and I use direct messages to find freelance writing opportunities, contact sources for articles, and—as most people who have messaged me in the past year can tell you—send links to my new book. But at my core, I’m just a woman with 170,782 Twitter followers and poor time-management skills. A reasonable person would have blocked DMs from strangers once they started streaming in daily—for me, around 2019. I did not.

I haven’t kept my DMs open just for professional benefits. The real reason is that they expose me to people I wouldn’t otherwise meet—people who tend to teach me something about themselves ( who might buy my book). The unsolicited messages I receive are sometimes sweet, sometimes sexual, and sometimes truly cruel: Senders tell me they like my tweets or