Thousands of scientists are cutting back on Twitter
nature.com
nature.com
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
- 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.