6 ms·

Thousands of scientists are cutting back on Twitter

95 points by zzzeek 3y ago

jackmott42 3y ago
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.
- londons_explore 3y ago
  Threads is a ghosttown round here. Far more activity on twitter still.
  - LexiMax 3y ago
    For now. It's a two-site race to see if Threads will add a web-facing front-end before BlueSky can come out of private beta.
- LexiMax 3y ago
  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. - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nitter-redirect/mohaicophfnifehkkkdbcejkflmgfkof https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nitter-redirect/mo... - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nitter-redirect/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nitter-redire...
  - burkaman 3y ago
    Nitter just broke yesterday and it seems unlikely it can be fixed: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/983 https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/983
    - LexiMax 3y ago
      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.
      - burkaman 3y ago
        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.
- v4dok 3y ago
  [flagged]
- josefresco 3y ago
  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.
  - SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
    Remember that week when people were jumping up and down to give Zuckerberg more power? That was a good one. How is Threads doing anyhow?
- indymike 3y ago
  > ethically corrupt to give them views/money 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.
- electrondood 3y ago
  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.
- smsm42 3y ago
  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.
  - LexiMax 3y ago
    > 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.
    - smsm42 3y ago
      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.
nailer 3y ago
[flagged]
SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
What kind of headline is that? 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.
- andyjohnson0 3y ago
  > 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. [1] or facebook, etc
  - SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
    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.
  - innocentoldguy 3y ago
    > Twitter doesnt care about free speech. It cares about revenue. Can’t it care about both?
londons_explore 3y ago
> 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.
- zzzeek 3y ago
  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!)"
  - londons_explore 3y ago
    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.
    - zzzeek 3y ago
      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.
paganel 3y ago
Good for them, less social media more meaningful work.
- mrd3v0 3y ago
  Science communication and being connected to the general public is meaningful.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
vinhboy 3y ago
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.
jgrahamc 3y ago
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.
irrational 3y ago
Is it Twitter or is it X? I thought the platform changed its name?
taylodl 3y ago
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?
- 1000100_1000101 3y ago
  > 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.
azangru 3y ago
> 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?
- tom_ 3y ago
  But people do argue for all of these things...? Anyway, clearly there's more than one way to deal with being vexed by what you read. A kind of exit/voice distinction.
jklinger410 3y ago
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.
nitin-pai 3y ago
Mastodon (more correctly, the Fediverse) is far more suited for interest-based communities than Twitter is. 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.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
dealuromanet 3y ago
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?
- tzs 3y ago
  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.
smsm42 3y ago
> 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?
- zzzeek 3y ago
  it sounds like they did this: 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

95 points by zzzeek 3y ago

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.

londons_explore 3y ago
Threads is a ghosttown round here. Far more activity on twitter still.
- LexiMax 3y ago
  For now. It's a two-site race to see if Threads will add a web-facing front-end before BlueSky can come out of private beta.
LexiMax 3y ago
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. - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nitter-redirect/mohaicophfnifehkkkdbcejkflmgfkof https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nitter-redirect/mo... - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nitter-redirect/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nitter-redire...
- burkaman 3y ago
  Nitter just broke yesterday and it seems unlikely it can be fixed: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/983 https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/983
  - LexiMax 3y ago
    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.
    - burkaman 3y ago
      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.
v4dok 3y ago
[flagged]
josefresco 3y ago
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.
- SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
  Remember that week when people were jumping up and down to give Zuckerberg more power? That was a good one. How is Threads doing anyhow?
indymike 3y ago
> ethically corrupt to give them views/money 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.
electrondood 3y ago
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.
smsm42 3y ago
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.
- LexiMax 3y ago
  > 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.
  - smsm42 3y ago
    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.

nailer 3y ago

[flagged]

SV_BubbleTime 3y ago

What kind of headline is that? 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.

andyjohnson0 3y ago
> 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. [1] or facebook, etc
- SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
  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.
- innocentoldguy 3y ago
  > Twitter doesnt care about free speech. It cares about revenue. Can’t it care about both?

londons_explore 3y ago

> 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.

zzzeek 3y ago
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!)"
- londons_explore 3y ago
  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.
  - zzzeek 3y ago
    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.

paganel 3y ago

Good for them, less social media more meaningful work.

mrd3v0 3y ago
Science communication and being connected to the general public is meaningful.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

vinhboy 3y ago

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.

jgrahamc 3y ago

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.

irrational 3y ago

Is it Twitter or is it X? I thought the platform changed its name?

taylodl 3y ago

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?

1000100_1000101 3y ago
> 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.

azangru 3y ago

> 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?

tom_ 3y ago
But people do argue for all of these things...? Anyway, clearly there's more than one way to deal with being vexed by what you read. A kind of exit/voice distinction.

jklinger410 3y ago

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.

nitin-pai 3y ago

Mastodon (more correctly, the Fediverse) is far more suited for interest-based communities than Twitter is. 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.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

dealuromanet 3y ago

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?

tzs 3y ago
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.

smsm42 3y ago

> 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?

zzzeek 3y ago
it sounds like they did this: 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