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Twitter was a valuable platform for scientific discourse in the past

jrhawley.ca

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Re: Twitter was a valuable platform for scientific discourse in the past

#21

Post by jrhawley »

anigbrowl wrote: post #2

This article makes excellent points in a cogent fashion. I partly disagree with the author that simply pointing at the existence of an alternative is sufficient. One of the reasons I've been very lukewarm about Mastodon is that it really lack the networks effects that make Twitter special; federation is a nice idea but the pragmatic benefits are a lot less clear. Being able to follow, track, and have conversations wi…

Author here, thanks for your thoughts.

I agree with you, just the existence of Mastodon/Discourse/others isn't sufficient. The onboarding and home/local/federated timelines of Mastodon can be a bit confusing at first, which does take some time to get used to. Just not being the other guys is the first of many necessary steps to being better.

And yes, scientists can't be entirely insulated from the wider public. Ideas that only stay in academia don't make the same impact that they need to in the wider world. Similarly, academics need to hear from the wider world to learn what problems are important and how their work can impact people. There need to be forums for interacting with large public audiences.

Re: Twitter was a valuable platform for scientific discourse in the past

#22

Post by nickthegreek »

xiphias2 wrote: post #18
the_third_wave wrote: post #6

Twitter is just as bad as it was before Musk took over with one exception: they removed the blatant partisan censorship. If that makes it worse than before for academics there is more at hand than it just being a viral meme-amplifier unsuited for academic discussions.

The bots are also removed. It's great to see human answers again even to the most provocative tweets (about help with Metamask and ETH just as an experiment)

That didnt happen.

Re: Twitter was a valuable platform for scientific discourse in the past

#23

Post by N1ckFG »

rvz wrote: post #11

They should have left years ago, rather than tolerate the decades of sewage and outrage around the platform. The problem is some think the solution is to replace it with a 'federated' outrage machine (Mastodon) which discoverability is an eternal problem with instance moderators banning entire instances for any reason if they wanted to. For the example of journa.host [0]. The same can easily happen for a Mastodon ins…

Mastodon's at the "email in 1994" stage--the general public is starting to become aware that it exists, and folks who were running small servers for their own purposes suddenly find themselves in a position to earn social capital by handing out accounts. Obviously in a few years at most, this will get tedious for the admins providing all that undercompensated labor. I think the winning scenario will be old-school webhosts including a personal Mastodon instance with their default package, like email. If that happens, Big Tech adoption will follow and we're quickly talking about a real standard with a lifespan of decades, if not more

Re: Twitter was a valuable platform for scientific discourse in the past

#24

Post by the_third_wave »

nickthegreek wrote: post #22
xiphias2 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bots are also removed. It's great to see human answers again even to the most provocative tweets (about help with Metamask and ETH just as an experiment)

That didnt happen.

I don't know and you don't know but xiphias2 seems to know. Can you (xiphias2) describe your 'experiment' and its outcome?

If the bots are 'gone' - are they already, all of them? - that would certainly make it a better place. I'll still not get an account as I find the format not conducive for the type of conversation I'm wont to engage in but it is clear that a bot-free (or at least bot-labelled) and bias-free (as far as possible, there will still be a weird [1] bias but I can live with that) Twitter is less of a problem than the biased bot-hive it used to be.

[1] https://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/Weird

Re: Twitter was a valuable platform for scientific discourse in the past

#25

Post by nickthegreek »

the_third_wave wrote: post #24
nickthegreek wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That didnt happen.

I don't know and you don't know but xiphias2 seems to know. Can you (xiphias2) describe your 'experiment' and its outcome? If the bots are 'gone' - are they already, all of them? - that would certainly make it a better place. I'll still not get an account as I find the format not conducive for the type of conversation I'm wont to engage in but it is clear that a bot-free (or at least bot-labelled) and bias-free (as f…

It is still biased and it is still filled with bots. It will most likely continue to be these 2 things. If anything, chatGPT will make sure its more of both moving forward.

Re: Twitter was a valuable platform for scientific discourse in the past

#26

Post by xiphias2 »

the_third_wave wrote: post #24
nickthegreek wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That didnt happen.

I don't know and you don't know but xiphias2 seems to know. Can you (xiphias2) describe your 'experiment' and its outcome? If the bots are 'gone' - are they already, all of them? - that would certainly make it a better place. I'll still not get an account as I find the format not conducive for the type of conversation I'm wont to engage in but it is clear that a bot-free (or at least bot-labelled) and bias-free (as f…

I was looking at this Tweet:

https://twitter.com/coinbureau/status/1602172317022445569?t=...

I don't have more data, and I'm sure there are more bots, but the replies look like they are from humans which is very different from a few months ago.

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