On Using Twitter

PS I'm old school in the sense that I don't have any inclination to tell you about who I am, but rather delight in the simple act of sharing ideas.

They literally cannot be irrelevant because they're official presidential communications - "The Department of Justice on Monday told a federal district court judge In Washington, D.C. that Donald Trump’s tweets are “official statements of the President of the United States.”"

https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/government_says_trum...

One of the biggest challenges was to decide what to do about ArXiv and pre-prints in general - most researchers keep track of new papers on their area, and therefore it is likely that they will be assigned as reviewers for a paper that they have already seen (and for which they already know who the authors are). This issue came up for a vote a couple years ago, and the chosen answer was to not disqualify papers for this outright but to kindly ask authors to refer from doing so.

At the same time, "88% consider double-blind reviewing at ACL conferences to be important", and only 14% of reviewers would penalize a paper for not including a relevant pre-print. This seems to me like a fair compromise. There is also work in progress to either talk to ArXiv to allow for author masking, and/or to create a new pre-print server that allows it. There is a very detailed report on the results of the survey in [1].

A second issue is whether the reviews should be made public, because it could compromise the double-blind process. The general result of the survey [2] was against it, where "support for public review tended to be inversely correlated with reviewing experience (and) female respondents were less likely to support public review than male respondents".

[1] https://www.aclweb.org/portal/sites/default/files/SurveyRepo...

[2] http://acl2019pcblog.fileli.unipi.it/wp-content/uploads/2019...

However, later on I realized that Twitter is actually a "outrage generating machine". Everyone is outraging over every trivial, even wrong, thing at every chance. This was very toxic. And since I was addicted to Twitter, it was affecting my mental sanity in very subtle ways.

Later on I unfollowed 90% accounts and stuck to those accounts which strictly tweets only about programming, math, history and other such stuffs in robotic manner (I.e. without any hidden agenda or connotations). I unfollowed everyone who have even a slightest chance of tweeting about politics. Also I stopped tweeting and replying to anybody.

Suddenly Twitter became a bit nicer place and now I only spend may be 5-10 min there.

If you can discipline yourself and carefully choose whom to follow, Twitter is great, otherwise it is a toxic hell.Just don't follow any political figure or any people who outrages on daily basis. And don't even try to debate there. It is not a debate plateform. It is broadcasting platform.