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Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place

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Re: Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place

#111

Post by tptacek »

I don't understand how Bluesky is going to continue to exist past 2026, based on the sharply declining usage, their headcount, and the amount of funding they've taken.

It has apparent value propositions past the social network, but none of those use cases are visibly taking off and none of them appear to be monetizable. The social network itself is what will be evaluated when they go out for more funding. And I don't see how you can raise at all for a social network in 2026 with flat numbers, let alone the declining numbers Bluesky actually has.

I've been dual-wielding Twitter and Bluesky for about a year (after a year off Twitter where I was mostly Mastodon), and, anecdatally, we've hit a point where the engagement and volume of stuff I see in Bluesky is lower than what I was getting even on Mastodon. Earlier on, there was some truth to the idea that Twitter had a much larger audience, but you'd get better engagement on Bluesky. I now get better engagement on Twitter. I can see people I had followed into Bluesky moving back to Twitter.

I have no idea what's going to happen, but I'm curious to hear a coherent story about how Bluesky isn't cooked.

Re: Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place

#112

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

fishgoesblub wrote: post #4

If only Bluesky could be as decentralised as the Fediverse [0] Trading one corporate overlord for another is not the smartest play. [0] https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/

> Trading one corporate overlord for another is not the smartest play.

Only if you expect to be there for ever even as they inevitably enshittify. Be under no illusion that although BlueSky is having its "first they are good to their users" phase now, it is temporary.

So make the most of it now while it's good, but be prepared to move on when that changes. Embracing impermanence is a smarter play. This is nothing new, thus passes all social media.

Re: Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place

#113

Post by bArray »

hdlothia wrote: post #35
Q6T46nT668w6i3m wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? Activism is an essential part of science but maybe I’m misunderstanding your use of “activist.”

I feel like scientists should be explaining to us how the world is, and then other people should use those explanations to try and improve it. Right now I feel like there are a scientists who would hide or discard results if they contradicted their advocacy beliefs,which is a dangerous place to be imo.

[flagged]

Re: Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place

#114

Post by glitchc »

techblueberry wrote: post #92
glitchc wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely not. A scientist is expected to change their mind when new, counterfactual evidence is presented. Activists push for positions regardless of whether any evidence exists to support their position, and seem to maintain their position even when presented with counterfactual evidence. That is not science. We have a name for it: dogma.

Wait a second, if you’re saying that this is not a feature of good activism, are you implying you are more convinced by activists who practice dogma over objective thinking? What is a scientist to do when they discover a vaccine or cure for something; say fuck it who cares if we change behavior? Are you saying a good vaccine advocate is someone who ignores the underlying science and acts dogmatically? It just feels l…

I have yet to observe an activist practice objective thinking. That was the root of the argument. Activists sometimes do back the correct argument, but not because they are practising scientific reasoning. Most activists are swayed by rhetoric, a good story. That's an emotional response, not a logical one.

To answer your second point, science has a process for disseminating new findings. It's not perfect, but it works. Organizations that scientists work for do pay attention to those sources, discoveries do get patented and productionized. I encourage you to conduct some research: See how many people were talking about mRNA vaccines and gain-of-function research on social media before COVID vs after. The lack of social media coverage didn't affect the science or the scientists, who had spent the past decade conducting research on the subject.

I will maintain that Twitter/X/Bluesky are not part of the scientific process, nor should they be. These platforms do not encourage objective thought or reasoned arguments.

Re: Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place

#115

Post by archagon »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #106
archagon wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it a pain when you can just skip the server selection process and use mastodon.social like pretty much everyone else?

I see that now the website shows a simpler choice - join mastodon.social or choose another server. I don't think it was like that when I joined (maybe 2 or 3 years ago), you were just given a list of servers or a search and told to choose. This is an improvement for average user onboarding - although if almost everyone clicks mastodon.social, you kind of lose the value of decentralization, right?

I think there’s still value to having a long tail of independent instances, which can readily become more dominant if something happens to compromise the primary mastodon.social instance.

Re: Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place

#116

Post by tjwebbnorfolk »

roughly wrote: post #100
bell-cot wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...an essential part... Why? Which of these other jobs would you call "Activism" an essential part of: - Fire fighter - Elementary school teacher - Auto mechanic - ER nurse - Professor of Medieval History

- Climate change - School shootings - Sure, they can shut up - COVID - Is this one serious?

Ah I see. So you want to use "science" to push particular political remedies to your pet issues.

Re: Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place

#117

Post by armchairhacker »

hdlothia wrote: post #6

It would be nice if scientists started being just scientists again instead of activists. Hopefully being cloistered on bluesky will bring the old vibes back

Why don't scientists publish anonymously? We already have double-blind peer review. This seems like such an obvious idea, there must be some issue.

Authors can still get reputation, recognition, and compensation for their papers, without people knowing who wrote what paper, via public/private keys and blockchain. Every time an author publishes a paper, they generate a new address and attach the public key to it. Judges send awards (NFTs) and compensation to the key without knowing who holds it, and if the same award type is given to multiple papers, authors can display it without anyone knowing which paper is theirs.

With LLMs even writing style can be erased (and as a side effect, the paper can be written in different formats for different audiences). Judges can use objective criteria so they can't be bribed without others noticing; in cases where the paper is an algorithm and the criteria is a formal proof, the "judge" can be a smart contract (in practice I think that would be a small minority of papers, but it would still be hard for a judge to nominate an undeserving paper while avoiding skeptics, because a deserving paper would match the not-fully-objective criteria according to a wide audience). Any other potential flaws?

Re: Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place

#118

Post by butterfi »

hdlothia wrote: post #6

It would be nice if scientists started being just scientists again instead of activists. Hopefully being cloistered on bluesky will bring the old vibes back

It would be nice if some politicians/media outlets didn't subvert or misrepresent science for their own gains. Yet here we are.

Re: Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place

#119

Post by krapp »

jsheard wrote: post #90
archagon wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it a pain when you can just skip the server selection process and use mastodon.social like pretty much everyone else?

Doesn't pretty much everyone using the same instance pretty much defeat the point?

No, because the point is that not everyone is forced to use the same instance.

When I started on Mastodon I created an account for each instance I wanted to post to, which was slightly annoying but not much more complicated than signing up for different subreddits. Now I have my own hosted account and follow whomever I like from there. Of course you can follow any account from any account (if the admin hasn't blocked it.)

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