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Comment by gms7777 | Hacker News Reader

In my academic circle, it remains important for my career. Even as some people have left, it's still super useful for discovering other peoples research, seeing what the post-publication conversation is for published or preprinted research, and for sharing my own. I think most people would be perfectly happy if the community moved to another platform, but to date there has been no real consensus on where that is.

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I bookmarked a lot of tweets over the years featuring papers in my research area. Last time I was doing a literature review I found most of them do not exist anymore. Which is sad.. I should've bookmarked the DOIs instead of the tweets.

Any chance they're on archive.org?

It's been suggested on mastodon that all Universities should have their own Mastodon instance, maybe that would go some way to alleviate this problem?

Universities used to be the pioneers of online communication but they seem to have become a lot more conservative in recent years.

Perhaps each research area need a mastodon instance to provide a locus for discussion and sharing of new work? Organised nationally or trans-nationally.

You don’t need to make it that complicated, really not.

Mastodon can already be a drop-in replacement for Twitter for many use cases. The biggest hurdle are, as ever, network effects. Not infrastructure, not features.

For me personally most of the people I care about already are on Mastodon. It was a smooth transition for me personally and I don’t miss a thing. All that needs to happen is for that to be also true for you and Mastodon is a drop in replacement.

On a personal level this is all true, but on an infrastructure level Mastodon can only survive and grow (and remain federated) with many well managed and well funded instances.

I’m really not too worried about that.

The biggest issue I can see developing is a Gmail-ification of Mastodon (with a lot of people being on a single instance).

That would be a pity – but in terms of freedom e-mail is still pretty great.

That's harder to manage. Universities have dedicated IT teams and infra; individual research groups, especially underfunded ones, do not, and organising research groups on any grand scale is like herding cats.

Social networks' usefulness is proportional to their size. That makes them sticky because any new network will be smaller and thus less useful.

Twitter is run by a guy who is becoming Emanuel Zorg before our eyes, eh?

The fact that it's still useful makes it more important to switch, not less. You're putting career before your basic values (I'm guessing) and as an academic I would hope you know that's wrong and have the honor to correct it.

I hear a lot of people say this but I find it suspect when you probe. I think it is entertaining for sure given the water cooler, but does it actually drive your productive work?

Here's an example from my area: https://twitter.com/IvanWerning/status/1643930683578916864

Right, a huge self posted thread on a paper with very few replies. A bunch of retweets though. Just read the paper! If it's important it will be talked about at next conference. But it feels good to scroll through economics paper announcements on twitter like HN and call it "work." (That's what I call my HN time too! No offense intended. I do it too. I think it's human nature.)

I think the two biggest areas it's useful is discoverability and networking. I often catch interesting papers on Twitter that I missed through other avenues. And a lot of people post threads highlighting the main takeaways of their papers which often saves a lot of time and confusion once I get into the paper itself. Also, I've definitely made connections on Twitter with whom I went on to meet up with at conferences and build both lasting professional connections and friendships, and which have led to some collaborations. It's also where a lot of people post job opportunities (especially postdoc openings). Back when I was looking for a postdoc (years back now), about half of my interviews came from people that had posted open calls on Twitter.

So, all told -- I don't think there's a lot of productive work (i.e., research) directly going on on twitter, but that doesn't mean that it isn't still making important contributions to the profession.

Also, yes, the water cooler is fun

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