Technology

I know there's an overlap, but i wish this article were specifically about mathematicians.

I didn’t even catch that. It’s great! Thanks for pointing it out!

The quality has just been too variable lately.

If you're still on Xitter, you're part of the problem.

why is this downVoted?

Also, maybe smart people shouldn't be putting all their eggs into one privately owned basket.

I yelled this from the mountain top when everyone was moving their businesses off their own websites and onto Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, but I was the minority. Why you would put the fate of your company, or hell, your government, into the hands of a mega-corp that is run by a sociopathic megalomaniac is beyond me.

Woah now hold on just a second, that almost sounds like you're criticising our perfect system of capitalism, in which a single person can and will accumulate enough wealth and power to buy and control hugely important things, and destroy them if they choose to. That's like, the whole point of capitalism, to transfer as much wealth and power into as few hands as possible, regardless of any silly moral issues.

Sure, we could nationalise such important services for the good of the planet, like the police, fire brigade, water, electricity, healthcare, road maintenance, public transport, etc, but what are we, commies? 😮

Yes! The sale should have never been allowed and I really wonder if the whole "made a big offer that he tried to back out of but was forced to follow through on" was just a big play put on by Elon and the regulators to get people to feel good about the sale going through rather than being blocked like it should have.

It probably was one of the best and simplest tools for the job.

I always cringe at this argument for tech companies. "Ohh, but they aren't/weren't profitable!"

That is by design. Any money that comes in, they double, triple invest in growth with some nebulous end goal that gets continuously kicked down the road to keep growing revenue year after year.

It's their business model to not be profitable.

They don't need to grow at break neck speeds. They can reduce spending and grow slowly at sustainable speeds if they choose. But they want to corner the domestic market, then then international market, then expand into adjacent markets, etc etc until they implode.

Same argument was made for ride share corporations during the gig worker reform initiatives. "Woe is Uber, they don't make money! They can't afford to give drivers benefits, or a minimum wage if rides are slow!"

No, they could have, if they didn't decide to throw mountains of cash on driverless R&D, international expansion, lobbying to kill taxi laws, subsidized ride rates in new markets, etc.

Same as Twitter paying celebrities to use their platform, news stations to adopt and push their platform, etc etc.

I don’t know about that. Twitter seemed like a pretty stable platform before the acquisition, not a platform on the decline. Lots of problems, but now it’s a whole different level.

TikTok

What scientist would not want to promote their latest research while wearing a CGI-generated cat head and doing interpretative dance to a base heavy riff by a band autotuned to sound like robotic pre-pubescent Japanese girls?

BlueSky is completely separate from Twitter. And as for TikTok, a social media scientist's concerns aren't really for their own personal privacy or the integrity of the web, but for reaching the largest audience they can.

Love it or hate it, TikTok is one of the largest audiences out there, period.

I've seen a handful switching to Substack as well. I've been experimenting with that platform lately and I like the post editor, lots of tools but not overly bloated, it's pretty good. My only complaint so far has been that a lot of History/Academic Substacks seem to be pushing for the paid tier and so hide a lot of their posts behind a paywall Patreon style. Because of that Mastodon has been my favorite since the Twitter exodus.

wrt TikTok I assume the poll just asked what other platforms you are on, not if you are posting career related things on the platform. Most grad students are in their 20s and probably use TikTok for entertainment.

When my partner shows me their feed on tiktok, we've run into quite a few folks trying to do community outreach through it. Can't say I'm a big fan of the app, but given how popular it is, I'm glad there are scientists who are trying to put out some decent information on it.

Can confirm. The moment he was handed the keys I closed my account.

I still feel bad for smaller artists who can't so easily bring their hard-earned following somewhere else along with them.

I can bet some of them are researchers that use tweet datasets to conduct various research. After the API price changes its literally too expensive to generate datasets.

I'm curious about this too. I would love to lurk in some science communities here.

I do know there's a lot of academics on Mastodon. Mastodon is way more fun than the Twitter ever was, because Mastodon let's me follow scientists and doesn't bury their posts.

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