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>It seems to degrade thoughtful people into ordinary ones and ordinary people into monsters. In my experience that’s about 90% true, but there’s a small minori
by SkyMarshal 7y ago
>It seems to degrade thoughtful people into ordinary ones and ordinary people into monsters.
In my experience that’s about 90% true, but there’s a small minority of people who remain thoughtful and insightful even in 280 characters. If you can find them and mutually follow each other, and then mute or block all the blowhards, tryhards and self-promoters, you’ll have cultivated a useful network of colleagues beyond what you might otherwise have via work and conferences.
And if multi-disciplinary perspectives are valuable to your own research, then that Twitter network is especially valuable in that regard, as it’s likely to be at least as multidisplinary as your day-to-day work environment and more-so than your usual conference circuit.
That said, it does take some work to cultivate that graph. May or may not be worth the time and opportunity cost.
- wsinks 7y agoSmart writeup! I'm definitely following some people that I know are 'pitching their dream' (like Peter Zeihan) but have access to useful data and make opinions. I definitely think that specific example is in the hot take category. Do you have any people you'd like to call out to follow? I'm curious about good environmental data and how we can better model our investment in our natural resources.
- SkyMarshal 7y agoAfraid I don't have any recommendations for your interests, but this kind of network is relatively personal and best cultivated on your own, without relying on others' recommendations, imho.
- abnry 7y agoI tried blocking the blowhards, but it didn't work. Problem was retweets and the 10% of the time someone sane decided to tweet something insane. Hard to counter that. My feed was just too leaky. So I quit. Things seemed to change around 2016...
- SyneRyder 7y agoYou can turn off retweets on a per-user basis, if someone is prone to retweeting nonsense. My answer to the 10% insanity has been to ruthlessly unfollow. Using the Twitter website is still madness, though. The only way I can survive Twitter is with an app like Tweetbot or Fenix, that doesn't show what other users Like & keeps everything chronological. They're still around from the days when Twitter was designed to be used by third-party client apps, ala IRC.
- SkyMarshal 7y ago*>My answer to the 10% insanity has been to ruthlessly unfollow. Second this, absolutely necessary. You don't need many connections to make it worthwhile, just ones you wouldn't otherwise connect with in some other way besides Twitter.