As recently showcased by Hillary Clinton, constructing one’s Twitter bio can be a stressful undertaking. With but 160 characters to make a first impression to the world, the stakes are high. Should you try to be funny? Self-deprecating? Ironic? Mysterious? Professional? Self-promoting?
All of these are good questions, and we have no answers. Probably, you should write your Twitter bio however you want. Except for one thing: Don’t joke that you were Time’s Person of the Year in 2006.
We make this suggestion not because you weren’t the magazine’s Person of the Year in 2006 — famously, or infamously, the “person” of the year that year was “you” — but because everybody is making that exact same joke. According to a search on Follower Wonk, 1,404 people boast of being Time’s 2006 “person of the year” in their Twitter bios, while another 91 went for the more outdated “man of the year.” Two people shortened “person of the year” to “POTY.” And one dude wrote “New York Times Person of the Year in 2006,” which is either some kind of genius meta-joke or, more likely, just a mistake.
If you were the only person making this joke, it would actually be a pretty good joke. But whatever cleverness it has to offer is, at this point, completely negated by the joke’s ubiquity. Don’t make this joke.
