At this point it has gotten bad enough that I won't even view twitter links. It is ethically corrupt to give them views/money, and dangerous. Threads is a reasonable replacement if you need the fix.
I use the Nitter Redirect extension to redirect Twitter links to a Nitter proxy site, though I do it for more practical reasons - mirrors tend to be more reliable and faster to load than Twitter itself these days.
It still seems to work intermittently. I'd chalk this up less to targeted malice and more up to the general problems Twitter has been having in the past few days.
I don't think it's an accident that this is happening at the same time that there is a "news site throttling" going on. I bet it's just yet another failing system at Twitter HQ.
I think it might still work for redirecting individual tweets, but viewing a profile seems permanently broken based on recent Twitter design changes pushing people to log in.
I've tried all the new networks, and I get the most engagement on the smallest: T2 Social - There's only 14K users but I routinely get more views, replies, & likes than Twitter/X where I have over 8x the followers.
I think it's just become a bad experience. Twitter / X has really just become no fun. I have enough stress in my life without adding the stuff Twitter's algorithm thinks I'm interested in.
Ditto. Throwing away all of your brand capital by changing the name to a letter, and blocking anyone from viewing content unless they create an account, were both pretty boneheaded moves.
I have to imagine that traffic plummeted after the latter.
I've left Twitter years ago. But I occasionally follow Twitter links and sometimes even refer to them, when there's no other choice. There's nothing "dangerous" in that and exactly nothing changed recently. And I must note in general that using "dangerous" (or "unsafe") to mean "has a non-zero risk of mildly annoying me" is extremely pretentious and obnoxious. The login requirement has been slightly annoying (note - not "dangerous") but only marginally as it still allows to view the main tweet, and the discussion under it is usually very low-value (also nothing new in it, has been like that for years).
I feel like all this "twitter is a hellscape now" is posing trying to get back at Musk because his idea about who should be allowed on twitter doesn't match theirs. And mainly for politically tribal and partisan reasons, to be blunt.
Also I note I have never followed or sent a link to Threads so far - not because I am somehow opposed to that, just there was no opportunity to do that since nothing that could interest me and is published there got into my attention so far. There's little reason to prefer one to the other, but effectively my experience shows twitter links sometimes contain useful information - I follow several every week - and I haven't seen any Threads links yet that did. Maybe in time that'll happen too.
> I feel like all this "twitter is a hellscape now" is posing trying to get back at Musk because his idea about who should be allowed on twitter doesn't match theirs. And mainly for politically tribal and partisan reasons, to be blunt.
I'm sure this is true of some people, but the habitual Twitter users I know have basically given up on the site as a shared social space because of changes to the feed algorithm and the blue check system making the sort of social engagement they used to regularly enjoy on the site almost impossible.
Well, blue check thing is part of the tribal reasons - "the plebes can have the blue checks now, the place is going to hell!".
As for the feed algos, there may be some truth to that, I personally have no idea since I never looked at the "feed" - I only ever engaged twitter by using direct links or reading the twitstream of specific people I was interested in. But I could imagine algorithm changes could ruin somebody's carefully constructed bubble and that could be upsetting. The reasons given in the article though have a strong political bent.
> But I could imagine algorithm changes could ruin somebody's carefully constructed bubble and that could be upsetting.
Well...yeah. That's social media for you. At the end of the day, you have to give people a reason to visit, it can't all be ragebait and crypto-scammers.
By all appearances, its utility as a social space has tanked, and that's not a hard sentiment to find even in this comments section. Twitter remains king of being a de-facto centralized RSS feed, but that position is very precarious.
I'm sure thousands of scientists are using twitter more too.
As just one example... Coming out of covid, if you think no mistakes were made in the censorship of ideas and actual science vs government mandated policy decisions, then... You probably are qualified to write for Nature.
What happened to the idea that you don't need to censor the people you don't like or they said a wrong thing? That if you expose their ideas to debate and truth that they will fall apart if they have no merit?
There should be BAD takes on Twitter. You should understand that is desirable.
> What happened to the idea that you don't need to censor the people you don't like or they said a wrong thing? That if you expose their ideas to debate and truth that they will fall apart if they have no merit?
Thats not how twitter [1] works. You don't drive engagement by presenting people with uncomfortable facts that challenge their beliefs. You do it by creating echo chambers that re-enforce their predudices. Twitter doesnt care about free speech. It cares about revenue.
I can rephrase then... Why is it so important to you that only the ideas you agree with have visibility?
Why are you even sure you are right?
Because of consensus? That's never been wrong.
Because all "the good people" think like you do? Cool, your tribe and religion will be happy to hear that.
Because the screens all agree with you? What an amazing coincidence and surely not a planned correlation.
... I feel like the real issue is we have convinced everything that their thought matters and when we see a thought that is different it makes us mad and we want to smash that downvote button or angrily reply.
But what if you're the wrong one?
Maybe open debate and exchange of ideas is just overall better for everyone.
It could, but it obviously doesn't. I'll go all the way back in time to yesterday when we got the reports of them slowing down sites that Musk didnt like.
> Twitter doesnt care about free speech. It cares about revenue.
And yet, when Twitter allowed a tiny bit more free speech, the same people who complained about corporations only caring about money started complaining that a) Twitter is hell now, and b) it's going to kill Twitter financially, but Musk doesn't care, because he's a crazy billionaire, and we need protections against crazy billionaires ruining valuable things.
> You do it by creating echo chambers that re-enforce their prejudices
And yet, significant number of complaints in the article is about how Musk ruined their nice echo chamber by letting the wrong-side accounts back in. So is the echo chamber bad or is it good? Or is it bad when it's people that disagree with me control it (then it's a pandemonium infested with trolls and misinformation), and good when people that agree with me control it (then it's a clean safe space platform that can be trusted and is full of valuable insights)?
You seem to be making a political point. I was simply pointing out that twitter just wants to show ads to as many people as possible. Thinking that it cares about free speech is a category error.
You do know what "a tiny bit" means? That's why I didn't say "Twitter became a bastion of free speech with spectacular record", I said "allowed a tiny bit more of free speech". I'm not betting on any horses here - as I wrote in another comment here, I left Twitter years before the whole Musk brouhaha started, and I am not planning to return ever. I am just noting not all complaints can be taken at face value.
They didn't ban journalists, and classifying people they reinstated as "white nationalists" without any further distinction is an extremely disingenuous take. Twitter restored tens of thousands of accounts, and the reasons for bans were extremely varied, so there's no way you could know every single one of those (62000 just at one reinstatement) are "white nationalists" and that's why they were reinstated. Among those restored were Kanye West, Jordan Peterson, satirical site "Babylon Bee", Kathy Griffin and tens of thousands of others. You are just throwing it out to smear them all because of political hate, because pre-Musk twitter mostly (though not only) banned people leaning to the right.
Which makes me think your intent is not to understand what I said but to maliciously misinterpret it to accuse me of some political sin that appears heinous to you. I have little interest in that, goodbye.
> Nature reached out to more than 170,000 scientists who were, or still are, users; nearly 9,200 responded. More than half reported that they have reduced the time they spend on the platform in the past six months and just under 7% have stopped using it altogether. Roughly 46% have joined other social-media platforms, such as Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads and TikTok.
7% attrition doesn't seem much. Half using it less than before isn't surprising if the other half are using it same or more than before. 46% joining other social media platforms isn't surprising either - social platforms come and go all the time.
Especially when 90% of those asked didn't answer the survey at all - upset users are probably more likely to respond to the survey.
Basically: I don't think the presented data backs up the sentiment of the headline.
how would you characterize "the sentiment of the headline"?
I mean, it reads as literally identical to the quote. "thousands of scientists are cutting back on twitter" and "more than half of 9200 (which would be....4600, hmm yep that's indeed "thousands") have reduced the time ("reduced"? Chatgpt whats a synonym for "cutting back" ?) they spend on the platform (ah what's "the platform"? Oh it's X, not twitter. Ha!)"
The headline is carefully worded to be technically correct yet misleading.
Most people reading the headline will believe that most scientists have left or are leaving and that twitter is about to collapse. And the data doesn't show that.
So you're in a boat, and a hole is in the base, and well, only a little bit of water has come in so far. Everything is fine?
In november of last year, there were no alternatives to Twitter at all save for Mastodon which was an unknown open source backwater. nobody needed them. Now we have a vastly larger Mastodon userbase as well as extremely serious competitors like Threads, Bluesky, Post, etc on the scene, and to a greater or lesser degree, people are moving to them. This seems pretty significant to me, if I were the person in charge of keeping Twitter where everyone is
Bigger picture, this kind of discussion is so silly. When Musk took over Twitter, Hacker News was all like "hooray! free speech at last!" what a joke, right? the man literally throttles /bans individual users and offlinks he personally doesn't like. I am going to posit right here that all of this "ho ho, the data shows nothing, if anything scientists are joining twitter" will also be similarly ridiculous in six months.
The full headline was too long to post. The headline is: "Thousands of scientists are cutting back on Twitter, seeding angst and uncertainty"
I think "seeding" is pretty directly in line with "could this be the start". Plus, they aren't really even getting at any kind of "grand exodus" here. That's not what this article is about. It's about there being no one place that is a clearinghouse for new scientific research to be posted, that is, a fragmenting of the community.
so you're correct! they used your idea. but they aren't getting at a "grand exodus" in any case, just the platform itself no longer being an effective place on which scientific researchers would singularly focus .
> how would you characterize "the sentiment of the headline"?
A lot of scientists are abandoning Twitter, and this is a significant development.
In reality, they could only talk to a tiny minority of people they tried to (which by itself causes selection bias - if I were ok with Twitter, I wouldn't talk to journalists about it, but if I had an ax to grind, I'd surely jump at the chance) - who are also a tiny minority of all Twitter users. And of those that did respond, they had about half using Twitter less (how much less? why? maybe they are busy doing, you know, actual science, instead of tweeting?) - what does it tell us? Pretty much nothing. But they are trying to build a narrative from it:
The survey from Nature asked whether people had changed their use of Twitter in the past six months and why. The reasons respondents gave varied, but many of those who had markedly reduced or stopped their activity on X mentioned Musk’s management of the platform. Many said that they had noticed an uptick in the amount of fake accounts, trolls and hate speech on the platform.
Žiga Malek, an environmental scientist at the Free University of Amsterdam, mentioned in the survey that he had started seeing a lot of “strange” political far-right accounts espousing science denialism and racism in his feed.
The message is clear: Musk removed the censorship and now far-right fascist racist trolls took over twitter and the scientists are fleeing from it. We need much more censorship - especially, political censorship - on the social media, or the science (especially female researchers struggling with inequity!) is doomed. That's the sentiment embedded in the message. That's why this article is written, actually.
> But they are trying to build a narrative from it:
I feel like the reality is that it has less to do with unbanning a bunch of alt-right trolls and more having to do with changes to tweet discoverability and blue-checks.
It's not hard to find people even in this thread complaining about how their feed has turned into a "ghost town," which foots with complaints I've heard from my Twitter-using acquaintances. That is a serious problem for a site that used to function as a shared social space.
It very well may be so, but Nature chooses to highlight exactly the "alt-right trolls" aspect of it, and pretty much brings no other possible reasons why it could be happening. Especially hilarious part is when they explain how Twitter is very important because "Scientists could discuss suspicions of research fraud, often anonymously" - when we fully know that Twitter has been consistently hunting down and removing any dissent from the self-appointed "scientific consensus", even about topics that we already know where the "consensus" was wrong (such as the question of COVID origins), and that an anonymous complaint about something that is considered part of the "consensus" would most certainly be dismissed as "troll". Even blue-checks could have been de-checked and suppressed for dissenting take on a "consensus" topic, but an anonymous there'd be no chance. But the important part is that "Twitter helped to raise awareness and accountability for concepts such as scientific colonialism". I mean, this article is positively stuffed with political references and shibboleths (which all lean to one side, of course), it's impossible to take it as any kind of neutral non-political research about what is happening with twitter.
Maybe, but the truth is that Twitter is not doing okay. It hasn't been doing okay ever since Elon bought the site, and it's because his purchase saddled the company with so much debt that he basically had no choice but to drastically change course.
In other words, the pretense that the site is doing just fine and that reports of its death are being overblown by a bunch of people with political axes to grind is _also_ a narrative, and one that simply doesn't foot with reality.
> It hasn't been doing okay ever since Elon bought the site
No, it hasn't been doing ok way before that, if you accept the criteria that the article purports to have (like supporting scientific discussion and surfacing complaints of dissenters, ignored by the mainstream sources) as the face value. Of course, that would be silly, because the real purpose of the article is to say "see, a bad man from the bad tribe took over Twitter and it's all awful now".
> because his purchase saddled the company with so much debt that he basically had no choice but to drastically change course.
He didn't hide his intentions to "change course" from the start. So it's not something that anything forced him to do - it's something that he bought it for. You can argue he was wrong to want it, but it's certainly was the goal, not a consequence of debt or anything else.
> the pretense that the site is doing just fine and that reports of its death are being overblown by a bunch of people with political axes to grind is _also_ a narrative
Of course. To argue against this narrative, one has to define what "just fine" means. I saw useful links on twitter before (occasionally), I see them now in pretty much the same quantity. Is it fine for me? Sure. Somebody got their safe space bubble ruined. Is it fine for them? Probably not. How do I generalize that? I don't know. I certainly know people with political axes to grind are significant part of the crowd claiming it's not fine, and this article provides massive amount of evidence for that. But yes, I do not know if there are other significant groups of people whose problems are of non-political nature, and how big these groups of people are and how vital their presence for twitter. This article is no help to me in that question.
> I saw useful links on twitter before (occasionally), I see them now in pretty much the same quantity.
You and I actually use Twitter in the same way. The era of Elon's ownership is the most unreliable the site has been since the days of the Fail Whale. The recent reliability fails have been publicized and obvious to those who engage with the site, and I've anecdotally noticed an uptick in the use of twitter proxies like fxtwitter, vxtwitter, nitter, threadreader, and others to help make twitter posts more available and reliable.
This is on top of the other existential threats to the site. The company is still mired in an enormous amount of debt. The site cannot attract even the marginal ad spend that the previous ownership managed. Threads has yet to release a publicly available web interface. BlueSky has yet to leave private beta.
So I feel very justified in saying that Twitter has not been doing okay since the Elon purchase, and I didn't even have to bring partisanship into the equation.
I think a lot of scientists are moving to Mastodon, but sometimes doubling their accounts. I am quite pleased with the feed that I’m getting on Mastodon now
I don't know about all scientific fields, but my own field (information security and cryptography) used to have a huge and vigorous community. My timeline now looks like a ghost town.
Worse than that, community participation operates based on network effects. A 7% loss of participants can have a much greater effect on the overall intensity of communication.
Mastodon's infosec.exchange is doing genuinely well. It's not the infosec Twitter of the olden days, but it's the most promising replacement we've got.
The users were contacted by email, not by twitter message.
You may be right that some users saw a survey about twitter in their inbox and thought "I've already left, therefore I'm not the target audience for that survey".
The Neuroscience community used to be vibrant and active on twitter, and now is sad and lonely with only a few extremely active voices left. The heaviest posters before are still there, and the extremely long tail seems to have left the conversation.
The new 'pay for ad impressions' scheme encourages twitter to direct more impressions at smaller and unverified tweeters. They don't have to pay out money for those impressions after all.
That scheme is ostensibly designed to encourage regulars to post*. The point of it is to grow the platform by Encouraging regular generation of new content, in order to attract a broader audience. If the people in question never see the money, it’s counter-productive because then they will be the one leaving or reducing their activity. So no, it does not encourage Twitter to have more less active users.
* I’m being generous here and consider that this was a genuine strategic decision, and not just “let’s cut a check to my nazi friend”.
True - and that would be the case if all users would be paid for ad impressions.
But when 99% of users are unverified, and you only do ad revenue sharing with the verified users who have over 5 million impressions (ie. a small fraction of a small fraction), the vast majority of users have no incentive to post good content.
That strategy worked for youtube though - youtube only pays out money to a tiny tiny fraction of users, many of whom work almost full time being a professional content creator.
> That strategy worked for youtube though - youtube only pays out money to a tiny tiny fraction of users, many of whom work almost full time being a professional content creator.
Yeah I think this was more or less the model. And it seems to work quite well. But then again, with Musk, who knows?
The only site I know that died from instant user migration is Digg. Lots of sites died a slow death from users moving on to better platforms, but rarely does anything die from boycott that I know of.
Since quitting Twitter the biggest thing I've noticed is that I don't click on Twitter links any more because they've messed up how non-logged in users get treated. If I casually look at someone's feed it shows me some list of tweets from years ago (I guess these are "top" in some sense); if I click on an individual tweet it either fails or shows one tweet and doesn't load the thread.
So, I've come to treat twitter.com like facebook.com and various news publications with a paywall: no point clicking and just move on with life.
FTA: “If you appear with your scientific contents between videos of cats,” she says, “it’s not a particularly good medium for promoting yourself professionally, anyway”.
That's how I've always viewed Twitter.
Is Mastodon a replacement? I don't know. I see HN as the social media for programmers. It may not be perfect, but it's been better than the alternatives so far. I figured the other professions would have something similar to HN?
> FTA: “If you appear with your scientific contents between videos of cats,” she says, “it’s not a particularly good medium for promoting yourself professionally, anyway”.
Seems like a great way to get your ideas noticed by a wider audience, increase scientific literacy of the general populace, etc. Maybe you don't want it to be your only outlet, but it seems like a beneficial one to use.
> Last December, after much consideration and several experiences of fighting misinformation on climate change and COVID-19, Jarochowska closed her account, feeling that her reputation could be at risk if she kept using the platform. She felt that Twitter was promoting provocative discourse over facts and encouraging a type of controversy that “is not what scientists should be associated with”, she says.
I could understand an argument saying that twitter has become less convenient to use - e.g it may shove Elon's tweets into people's faces, or not populate the feed properly; or that it has become impossible to use with custom clients. I would totally get that. But the argument they are making -- ooh, Twitter allows people to spout nonsense about covid or climate; aah there is misinformation on Twitter -- vexes me. There is a ton of misinformation on the internet in general; and yet no-one is arguing for going off the internet, or is embarrassed to be "associated" with the internet. Why is it so different with twitter? Why aren't people advocating for choosing your friends wisely and not getting into arguments with unpleasant people?
When was this study done? *All* of the discussion around LK99 was on Twitter.
Social networks are very much about the users and then obviously getting the right posts to the right people. Facebook does a terrible job of showing posts from accounts you don't follow, or with trending hashtags. Leaving Twitter still as the clear front-runner.
Until the comedians, academics, news networks and nonprofits leave Twitter, it will hold its spot. Unless Musk actually crashes the thing.
I wanted to make a Twitter / X account but the sign-up flow requires you to solve 10 of those puzzles where you have to rotate the animal with the matching symbol to be oriented in the direction that the hand with that symbol is pointing in. After putting up with this next-gen captcha to train X's algorithm for free, it asked me to do another 10 because supposedly it couldn't tell if I'm a human or not. So I decided not to bother with making an account since it's clearly trying to monetize by obtaining free training data for its ML. I also don't trust that they're not attempting to associate performance on these types of tasks with someone's identity to infer things about them and sell that data further.
Is this what it now takes for a sign-up to be credibly done by a human? Or is it just a cheap attempt to obtain free training sets from people who aren't being paid to label data?
I could understand this if it were about Google's old CAPTCHA that used scans from books and could use the user input to improve an OCR system, or Cloudflare's CAPTCHA that asks you to click the pictures that contained traffic lights or bikes or whatever where the user input can be used to improve an image classification system.
Better OCR and better image classifies are things you can make money with.
It is not clear to me how one makes money from a "what way is this animal pointing?" classifier (especially since building that CAPTCHA requires them to have a photo of the animal where they already know it is pointing close to 0, 60, 90, 150, 210, or 270 degrees).
This seems to be a task that likely only be of interest as part of a CAPTCHA and so the most that your solving it for will do is improve the CAPTCHA. It's not like OCR or image recognition where you might be improving some separate money making product of theirs.
> Nature obtained the e-mail addresses of thousands of scientists who were identified through a social-media research project as having tweeted about papers on which they were a corresponding author
Is this public information? How does one "obtain" somebody's email address from a tweet?
80 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 129 ms ] thread- https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nitter-redirect/mo...
- https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nitter-redire...
I don't think it's an accident that this is happening at the same time that there is a "news site throttling" going on. I bet it's just yet another failing system at Twitter HQ.
I think it's just become a bad experience. Twitter / X has really just become no fun. I have enough stress in my life without adding the stuff Twitter's algorithm thinks I'm interested in.
I have to imagine that traffic plummeted after the latter.
I feel like all this "twitter is a hellscape now" is posing trying to get back at Musk because his idea about who should be allowed on twitter doesn't match theirs. And mainly for politically tribal and partisan reasons, to be blunt.
Also I note I have never followed or sent a link to Threads so far - not because I am somehow opposed to that, just there was no opportunity to do that since nothing that could interest me and is published there got into my attention so far. There's little reason to prefer one to the other, but effectively my experience shows twitter links sometimes contain useful information - I follow several every week - and I haven't seen any Threads links yet that did. Maybe in time that'll happen too.
I'm sure this is true of some people, but the habitual Twitter users I know have basically given up on the site as a shared social space because of changes to the feed algorithm and the blue check system making the sort of social engagement they used to regularly enjoy on the site almost impossible.
As for the feed algos, there may be some truth to that, I personally have no idea since I never looked at the "feed" - I only ever engaged twitter by using direct links or reading the twitstream of specific people I was interested in. But I could imagine algorithm changes could ruin somebody's carefully constructed bubble and that could be upsetting. The reasons given in the article though have a strong political bent.
Well...yeah. That's social media for you. At the end of the day, you have to give people a reason to visit, it can't all be ragebait and crypto-scammers.
By all appearances, its utility as a social space has tanked, and that's not a hard sentiment to find even in this comments section. Twitter remains king of being a de-facto centralized RSS feed, but that position is very precarious.
I'm sure thousands of scientists are using twitter more too.
As just one example... Coming out of covid, if you think no mistakes were made in the censorship of ideas and actual science vs government mandated policy decisions, then... You probably are qualified to write for Nature.
What happened to the idea that you don't need to censor the people you don't like or they said a wrong thing? That if you expose their ideas to debate and truth that they will fall apart if they have no merit?
There should be BAD takes on Twitter. You should understand that is desirable.
Thats not how twitter [1] works. You don't drive engagement by presenting people with uncomfortable facts that challenge their beliefs. You do it by creating echo chambers that re-enforce their predudices. Twitter doesnt care about free speech. It cares about revenue.
[1] or facebook, etc
Why are you even sure you are right?
Because of consensus? That's never been wrong.
Because all "the good people" think like you do? Cool, your tribe and religion will be happy to hear that.
Because the screens all agree with you? What an amazing coincidence and surely not a planned correlation.
... I feel like the real issue is we have convinced everything that their thought matters and when we see a thought that is different it makes us mad and we want to smash that downvote button or angrily reply.
But what if you're the wrong one?
Maybe open debate and exchange of ideas is just overall better for everyone.
Can’t it care about both?
And yet, when Twitter allowed a tiny bit more free speech, the same people who complained about corporations only caring about money started complaining that a) Twitter is hell now, and b) it's going to kill Twitter financially, but Musk doesn't care, because he's a crazy billionaire, and we need protections against crazy billionaires ruining valuable things.
> You do it by creating echo chambers that re-enforce their prejudices
And yet, significant number of complaints in the article is about how Musk ruined their nice echo chamber by letting the wrong-side accounts back in. So is the echo chamber bad or is it good? Or is it bad when it's people that disagree with me control it (then it's a pandemonium infested with trolls and misinformation), and good when people that agree with me control it (then it's a clean safe space platform that can be trusted and is full of valuable insights)?
Did they!
Was that before or after they banned a bunch of journalist's accounts for making Elon mad?
https://observer.com/2022/12/left-wing-twitter-accounts-crit...
https://www.thewrap.com/elon-musk-called-out-banned-left-win...
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/a-leaked-internal-mess...
If you're really such a fan of free speech, you've bet on the wrong horse.
I see, so on the one hand banned journalists, but on the otherhand reinstated white nationalist accounts so, you know, net positive in your books?
Okay. Sure. Why not.
A few were suspended for a short time after Twitter say the broke written TOS.
Be honest and clear.
Which makes me think your intent is not to understand what I said but to maliciously misinterpret it to accuse me of some political sin that appears heinous to you. I have little interest in that, goodbye.
7% attrition doesn't seem much. Half using it less than before isn't surprising if the other half are using it same or more than before. 46% joining other social media platforms isn't surprising either - social platforms come and go all the time.
Especially when 90% of those asked didn't answer the survey at all - upset users are probably more likely to respond to the survey.
Basically: I don't think the presented data backs up the sentiment of the headline.
I mean, it reads as literally identical to the quote. "thousands of scientists are cutting back on twitter" and "more than half of 9200 (which would be....4600, hmm yep that's indeed "thousands") have reduced the time ("reduced"? Chatgpt whats a synonym for "cutting back" ?) they spend on the platform (ah what's "the platform"? Oh it's X, not twitter. Ha!)"
Most people reading the headline will believe that most scientists have left or are leaving and that twitter is about to collapse. And the data doesn't show that.
In november of last year, there were no alternatives to Twitter at all save for Mastodon which was an unknown open source backwater. nobody needed them. Now we have a vastly larger Mastodon userbase as well as extremely serious competitors like Threads, Bluesky, Post, etc on the scene, and to a greater or lesser degree, people are moving to them. This seems pretty significant to me, if I were the person in charge of keeping Twitter where everyone is
Bigger picture, this kind of discussion is so silly. When Musk took over Twitter, Hacker News was all like "hooray! free speech at last!" what a joke, right? the man literally throttles /bans individual users and offlinks he personally doesn't like. I am going to posit right here that all of this "ho ho, the data shows nothing, if anything scientists are joining twitter" will also be similarly ridiculous in six months.
I think "seeding" is pretty directly in line with "could this be the start". Plus, they aren't really even getting at any kind of "grand exodus" here. That's not what this article is about. It's about there being no one place that is a clearinghouse for new scientific research to be posted, that is, a fragmenting of the community.
so you're correct! they used your idea. but they aren't getting at a "grand exodus" in any case, just the platform itself no longer being an effective place on which scientific researchers would singularly focus .
Imagine it rewritten as "3% of scientists contacted by us said they were cutting back on Twitter".
A lot of scientists are abandoning Twitter, and this is a significant development.
In reality, they could only talk to a tiny minority of people they tried to (which by itself causes selection bias - if I were ok with Twitter, I wouldn't talk to journalists about it, but if I had an ax to grind, I'd surely jump at the chance) - who are also a tiny minority of all Twitter users. And of those that did respond, they had about half using Twitter less (how much less? why? maybe they are busy doing, you know, actual science, instead of tweeting?) - what does it tell us? Pretty much nothing. But they are trying to build a narrative from it:
The survey from Nature asked whether people had changed their use of Twitter in the past six months and why. The reasons respondents gave varied, but many of those who had markedly reduced or stopped their activity on X mentioned Musk’s management of the platform. Many said that they had noticed an uptick in the amount of fake accounts, trolls and hate speech on the platform. Žiga Malek, an environmental scientist at the Free University of Amsterdam, mentioned in the survey that he had started seeing a lot of “strange” political far-right accounts espousing science denialism and racism in his feed.
The message is clear: Musk removed the censorship and now far-right fascist racist trolls took over twitter and the scientists are fleeing from it. We need much more censorship - especially, political censorship - on the social media, or the science (especially female researchers struggling with inequity!) is doomed. That's the sentiment embedded in the message. That's why this article is written, actually.
I feel like the reality is that it has less to do with unbanning a bunch of alt-right trolls and more having to do with changes to tweet discoverability and blue-checks.
It's not hard to find people even in this thread complaining about how their feed has turned into a "ghost town," which foots with complaints I've heard from my Twitter-using acquaintances. That is a serious problem for a site that used to function as a shared social space.
In other words, the pretense that the site is doing just fine and that reports of its death are being overblown by a bunch of people with political axes to grind is _also_ a narrative, and one that simply doesn't foot with reality.
No, it hasn't been doing ok way before that, if you accept the criteria that the article purports to have (like supporting scientific discussion and surfacing complaints of dissenters, ignored by the mainstream sources) as the face value. Of course, that would be silly, because the real purpose of the article is to say "see, a bad man from the bad tribe took over Twitter and it's all awful now".
> because his purchase saddled the company with so much debt that he basically had no choice but to drastically change course.
He didn't hide his intentions to "change course" from the start. So it's not something that anything forced him to do - it's something that he bought it for. You can argue he was wrong to want it, but it's certainly was the goal, not a consequence of debt or anything else.
> the pretense that the site is doing just fine and that reports of its death are being overblown by a bunch of people with political axes to grind is _also_ a narrative
Of course. To argue against this narrative, one has to define what "just fine" means. I saw useful links on twitter before (occasionally), I see them now in pretty much the same quantity. Is it fine for me? Sure. Somebody got their safe space bubble ruined. Is it fine for them? Probably not. How do I generalize that? I don't know. I certainly know people with political axes to grind are significant part of the crowd claiming it's not fine, and this article provides massive amount of evidence for that. But yes, I do not know if there are other significant groups of people whose problems are of non-political nature, and how big these groups of people are and how vital their presence for twitter. This article is no help to me in that question.
You and I actually use Twitter in the same way. The era of Elon's ownership is the most unreliable the site has been since the days of the Fail Whale. The recent reliability fails have been publicized and obvious to those who engage with the site, and I've anecdotally noticed an uptick in the use of twitter proxies like fxtwitter, vxtwitter, nitter, threadreader, and others to help make twitter posts more available and reliable.
This is on top of the other existential threats to the site. The company is still mired in an enormous amount of debt. The site cannot attract even the marginal ad spend that the previous ownership managed. Threads has yet to release a publicly available web interface. BlueSky has yet to leave private beta.
So I feel very justified in saying that Twitter has not been doing okay since the Elon purchase, and I didn't even have to bring partisanship into the equation.
Worse than that, community participation operates based on network effects. A 7% loss of participants can have a much greater effect on the overall intensity of communication.
Alternatively: many of the 90% didn't answer because they have already left Twitter.
You may be right that some users saw a survey about twitter in their inbox and thought "I've already left, therefore I'm not the target audience for that survey".
The long tail leaving I suspect is because unless you are verified, your tweets will be seen by almost nobody.
Post a few tweets that get just 1 view, and you will soon be demoralized and stop tweeting.
* I’m being generous here and consider that this was a genuine strategic decision, and not just “let’s cut a check to my nazi friend”.
But when 99% of users are unverified, and you only do ad revenue sharing with the verified users who have over 5 million impressions (ie. a small fraction of a small fraction), the vast majority of users have no incentive to post good content.
That strategy worked for youtube though - youtube only pays out money to a tiny tiny fraction of users, many of whom work almost full time being a professional content creator.
Yeah I think this was more or less the model. And it seems to work quite well. But then again, with Musk, who knows?
"Elon Musk reinstates Kanye West [...]"
"antisemitic rants ... he tweeted an image of a swastika ... praised Adolf Hitler and the Nazis ..."
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/jul/30/elon-musk-rein...)
There's a breakdown of responses in a chart included in the article:
- 6.7% stopped usage
- 24% significantly decreased usage
- 23.3% slightly decreased usage
- 37.3% have been about the same
- 6% have slightly increased usage
- 2.8% have significantly increased usage
So, I've come to treat twitter.com like facebook.com and various news publications with a paywall: no point clicking and just move on with life.
That's how I've always viewed Twitter.
Is Mastodon a replacement? I don't know. I see HN as the social media for programmers. It may not be perfect, but it's been better than the alternatives so far. I figured the other professions would have something similar to HN?
Seems like a great way to get your ideas noticed by a wider audience, increase scientific literacy of the general populace, etc. Maybe you don't want it to be your only outlet, but it seems like a beneficial one to use.
I could understand an argument saying that twitter has become less convenient to use - e.g it may shove Elon's tweets into people's faces, or not populate the feed properly; or that it has become impossible to use with custom clients. I would totally get that. But the argument they are making -- ooh, Twitter allows people to spout nonsense about covid or climate; aah there is misinformation on Twitter -- vexes me. There is a ton of misinformation on the internet in general; and yet no-one is arguing for going off the internet, or is embarrassed to be "associated" with the internet. Why is it so different with twitter? Why aren't people advocating for choosing your friends wisely and not getting into arguments with unpleasant people?
Anyway, clearly there's more than one way to deal with being vexed by what you read. A kind of exit/voice distinction.
Social networks are very much about the users and then obviously getting the right posts to the right people. Facebook does a terrible job of showing posts from accounts you don't follow, or with trending hashtags. Leaving Twitter still as the clear front-runner.
Until the comedians, academics, news networks and nonprofits leave Twitter, it will hold its spot. Unless Musk actually crashes the thing.
With communities getting onto their own servers (journa.host, econtwitter.net) the quality of network effects is increasing.
Twitter/X will end up as a place to share stuff that riles people up.
Is this what it now takes for a sign-up to be credibly done by a human? Or is it just a cheap attempt to obtain free training sets from people who aren't being paid to label data?
Better OCR and better image classifies are things you can make money with.
It is not clear to me how one makes money from a "what way is this animal pointing?" classifier (especially since building that CAPTCHA requires them to have a photo of the animal where they already know it is pointing close to 0, 60, 90, 150, 210, or 270 degrees).
This seems to be a task that likely only be of interest as part of a CAPTCHA and so the most that your solving it for will do is improve the CAPTCHA. It's not like OCR or image recognition where you might be improving some separate money making product of theirs.
Is this public information? How does one "obtain" somebody's email address from a tweet?
1. person tweeted a paper
2. nature looked in the paper for authors w/ email addresses
3. nature cross-linked the author name / email address w/ persons name on twitter account