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Scientists No Longer Find X Professionally Useful, and Have Switched to Bluesky
- jppope 1y agoSeems to be similar to my experience. I used to go to track and follow interesting individuals - scientists, engineers, artists... then it all got washed away with flamebait. Bluesky doesn't feel like its there yet, but I'm hopeful
- CursedSilicon 1y ago[flagged]
- ath3nd 1y agoWhat about studying...Nazi bots?
- nreece 1y agoI'm trying to like Bluesky. X has a large tech community and some deep thoughts/discussions on tech and philosophy matters, but I can't find similar people or groups on Bluesky yet.
- freilanzer 1y agoSame with Mastodon for me. It's good, and the app is well done, but there's just no reason for me to use it.
- Leynos 1y agoSearch for "<topic of interest> starter pack"
- snowwrestler 1y agoOn both Twitter and Bluesky, my best results at feed building have come from finding one person I find valuable, then looking at and following people they interact with and follow. A brief look at bios and recent posts helps. Then repeating this for additional interesting people. I am fast to follow but also fast to unfollow if a person turns out to be a dud. An example of a dud is a person who is a cybersecurity expert but almost all their posts were about their travel: which hotels treated them well, complaints about flights, etc. Bluesky also has a notion of lists, which folks seem to use. For example someone curates a list of people active in local politics and it’s a quick way for me to plug into what local activists and politicians are talking about. Again, I found it via one person I found interesting.
- OneDeuxTriSeiGo 1y agoIt really depends what you are looking for. Try searching for some starter packs to seed your follow graph. The below site works well but the search is a bit dumb/literal and the packs are all user created so you'll want to check some of the accounts in the packs that come up before you blindly follow them. https://blueskydirectory.com/starter-packs https://blueskydirectory.com/starter-packs
- aaron695 1y ago[dead]
- quotemstr 1y ago[flagged]
- ath3nd 1y ago[flagged]
- oddmade 1y agoTHIS
- Leynos 1y agoIs it unreasonable not to want to share a social network with the people who want to exclude you from practical participation in society?
- cmxch 1y agoIf you’re providing products of scientific research that have societal impact, it is a certain type of actionable cowardice to hide in a BlueSky hugbox.
- matthewdgreen 1y agoYou’re posting this here on HN which is a curated social space that absolutely does not let you post annoying things that serve only to offend people and is good because it produces high signal/noise. Presumably you’re here because you appreciate that high quality discussion. Thats what Twitter used to be like for scientists, except that you also had access to smart people from industry and smart non-scientists as well and so “scientists in the academic bubble” had access to a huge number of perspectives. Now X is 4chan. 4chan is useful for its specific brand of content, it’s just not useful the way HN is or Twitter was.
- quotemstr 1y agoIt would be one thing if Bluesky were a no-politics, effortpost-only zone. It's not that though. In actuality, Bluesky is an echo chamber just like 2010s-era Twitter, but somehow even more strident. Academics who insisting on their colleagues moving to Bluesky aren't deleting noise. That's a pretext. What these academics are really doing is trying to use their social power to enforce singular answers to questions that divide the public. They're tacitly asserting that nobody can be a legitimate intellectual and disagree with them on social issues having nothing to do with their field. I'm not going to waste my time on people who can't tolerate divergent perspectives. X has plenty of tools to help people prune distractions from their timelines. This isn't a signal to noise ratio thing so much as a contamination taboo. Frazer would be proud. The problem these academics have with X isn't that it's noisy channel, but actually that it lets the wrong people participate. These academics think they have a monopoly on knowledge production, but they don't. Close-mindedness bleeds from the social to the professional domain with terrifying speed. Censorship is anathema to discovery. When academics try to use ostracism to build echo chambers like Bluesky, they're only accelerating the ongoing divorce of academia and scholarship.
- ryzvonusef 1y agoBlueSky and Mastodon are as relevant and useful as Blogger.com; Threads meanwhile has leeched itself to Instagram and somehow existing. There is no point in creating an account there, even the Elon Haters have gone back, they keep the BSky account as a backup. Sad, but if you want to feel the global pulse (however weak) X/Twitter is still the place. Also X/Twitter is an insane name.
- sitzkrieg 1y agomastodon is a fediverse client. not a destination. its worth getting right
- viraptor 1y ago> even the Elon Haters have gone back, they keep the BSky account as a backup. My Mastodon timeline full of interesting people says otherwise. I think you're overgeneralising some experience.
- spiderfarmer 1y agoTotally not my experience. All interesting people are on Bluesky now and quite active.
- matthewdgreen 1y agoI have 140k followers and a strong incentive to go back to X. I do check in occasionally for the reasons you state, and it’s unusable and high-noise every time I do it. There was a golden age for science on Twitter and it’s over. On BlueSky I don’t get the huge engagement (and there’s too much politics) but I can blather on about cryptography and people are enthusiastic and I don’t get weird bluecheck crypto scammers in my replies.
- ranguna 1y agoCould it be your algorithm on X is now uncalibrated due to your prolonged absence ?
- snowwrestler 1y ago
- yupyupyups 1y agoI registered a Bluesky account not too long ago and noticed shortly after a regular appearance of gay and furry nsfw content. The NSFW setting was turned off, so these accounts are for whatever reason neglecting to tag their content properly. Telling Bluesky that I'm not interested in "this type of content" didn't help remove the problem. Blocking/Reporting the accounts is futile, as they are so numerous. Moderation lists for LGBT/furry content seem to be nonexistent or unlisted from public modlist sites (maybe they are considered to be "homophobic"?) Anyway, Bluesky does't seem to be safe-for-work, so it's hardly a proper replacement for Twitter. If this is fixed, then that would be good.
- Leynos 1y agoRegular appearance as in posted by the people you follow?
- yupyupyups 1y agoNope, I didn't follow anything of the sort.
- Leynos 1y agoSo how did the content appear in your feed?
- Bric3d 1y agoLikely using the "discover" or "popular with friends" feeds, not sure why one would do that to themselves on either bluesky or twitter.
- IAmGraydon 1y agoDo you use social media? You seem unaware of how it’s worked for over a decade.
- Leynos 1y ago
- ZeroGravitas 1y agoSeveral comments already angrily agreeing with the claim in the headline, which is weird. "Yeah, those academics are all in a bubble together on bsky". Yes, that sounds "professionally useful", to be in a bubble with the people who work in the same field.
- metalman 1y agothe bubble already exists, or.....tower, it's called academia.What is quite clear from many personal experiences in online semi professional forums, is that what many top notch acedemics crave is to "profess" to an interested random group in the hopes of finding successors and students, or colaborators that are missing from there actual real world life. This is proving to be clumsy and time consuming, with no good way to moderate, and distinguish between those who's enthusiasims are positive and the always almost's. This whole phenominon is ancient, and we have accounts of identical situations from the agora of athens and many other citys open .....forums the open forumis messy, but it inevitably yields new thoughts and actions bieng adopted, vs a closed school, that yield orthodox reactionary beurocratic stagnancy.
- Arubis 1y agoThe term “filter bubble” has stopped being quite so universal and become more of a right wing talking point.
- add-sub-mul-div 1y agoBetween a bubble and the culture war screeching that is inextricably Twitter now, I'll take the bubble.
- nunobrito 1y agoThese news are awfully similar to click-bait stating "the science is settled" by grouping a small set of the group and then pretending it represents the whole. The paper failed both to identify the overall number of scientists using X or the cases where multiple platforms are used (most common scenario). Therefore the paper only seems biased on its best scenario or downright propaganda at its worst. NOSTR and Mastodon should never be left out of any serious research.
- traceroute66 1y ago> The paper failed both to identify .... But its published by Oxford, so it must be perfect. /s
- hopelite 1y ago[flagged]
- beepbooptheory 1y agoPretty wild how important social media is for some people.. We seem now to be at the level of public school DARE officer lecture. Everything else aside, its just amazing how much things have changed, how alien this sentiment would seem if transported back even like 15 years.. "I have been groomed into joining the social media platform of the ruling aristocracy!" This is odd right? Or am I out of touch? There just seems prima facie to be more important things to care about, but maybe I am just an old man now. It all just feels like some ominous prelude to 15 years from now where twitter accounts are compulsory and we all get food stamps based on retweets or something..
- ringeryless 1y agowhy would a scientist need anti-social media?
- sgt 1y agoScientists have used Twitter for more than a decade before Elon took over. It was extremely popular and there were large communities of scientists there sharing all kinds of stuff. After it became X, they have largely disappered. Many just stopped doing that kind of social media.
- IAmBroom 1y agoWhy would someone else communicate in a way that you disapprove of? Well, because they are someone else.
- ringeryless 1y agoi wonder why various governments and journalists keep using anti-social media as well, due to the innate conflict of interest: anti-social media is all about sinking governments and trad journalism. don't go on the rival platform and legitimize it further, IMO
- michaelt 1y agoBecause to get votes from voters and views on their articles, they have to go to where people are, not where they wish people were.
- snowwrestler 1y agoIt is often not a rational decision. People spend time on social media because they find it interesting or entertaining. That doesn’t mean it is actually useful or good for them. That includes journalists. High-profile brands are somewhat stuck because departing would cause a negative news cycle. Quite a few have shrunk their organic social media teams and put more resources into paid social media, which has a more directly measurable ROI.
- madeofpalk 1y agoI find it really difficult to care about whether other people use a website or not. I stopped using it at one point, and I started using another website instead. I really don't care if other people continue to use it because I can just continue on with my life ignoring it.
- m-schuetz 1y agoI wish that was the case but at least in my domain, after many people initially switched to bluesky, most eventually went back since many high-profile people did not make the switch.
- vaylian 1y agoDo you have any hypotheses why these high-profile people didn't make the switch? I guess that many high-profile people are too busy with their regular work to be mindful of politics/ethics and thus they can't be bothered to switch. But maybe there are other reasons as well?
- bluescrn 1y agoIt's no escape from the angry political stuff, it's just a jump from one end of the political spectrum to the other. Best to just cut down the social media usage. Twitter-style social media isn't a good place to have deep and meaningful discussions of anything. Shame though, way back before Trump/Brexit and the era of extreme tribalism, Twitter was full of interesting creative and technical stuff :(
- OneDeuxTriSeiGo 1y agoFor what it's worth bluesky is fairly low on politics if you unpin the discover feed. The following feed is purely content by people you follow. There are also other feeds like "for you" which only shows you posts liked by the people who liked the posts you liked. If you mainly interact with niche/technical/creative content and avoid politics, those feeds will trend towards avoiding politics as well.
- archagon 1y agoI’ve observed that most of those who switched back are egotists addicted to their status as influencers, not people wishing to actually participate in public conversations. Good riddance, I say. My Bluesky and Mastodon feeds are much nicer these days without pseudo-celebrities Pontificating About Important Things.
- 1y ago
- mellosouls 1y agoIn recent years, new leadership at Twitter has made substantive changes that have resulted in increases in the prevalence of pseudoscience, conspiracy theory, and harassment on the platform changes to Twitter have made the social media platform no longer professionally useful or pleasant I think we need to be honest that - while there is some truth there - this is the view from elements of the left who were instrumental in suppressing conservative voices and generally making it an unpleasant environment for people who did not subscribe to modish cultural takes under the previous management. The alternative view is of course that for good or ill, freedom of speech is a much higher priority now - which you would think is more in tune with scientific and rational enquiry. None of that is mentioned in the abstract which immediately suggests caution should be taken when evaluating this study.
- stubish 1y agoYou are claiming that elements of the left harassed conservative voices on the platform, which agrees completely with the point to are attempting to discredit. The sort of harassment that can only occur by placing a high priority on freedom of speech. It is hard to have a professional discussion with angry people shouting at you, no matter your ideology.
- mellosouls 1y agoYou are claiming that elements of the left harassed conservative voices on the platform You misquote me. I said "suppressing" not "harassed". I disagree strongly with both, but it is the former that is incompatible with free speech; the latter exploits it.
- stubish 1y agoSuppressing is a form of harassment. The easiest and most common way of suppressing speech is to just keep shouting at an opponent so nobody can hear what they are saying. As discussed in the article, a situation where the platform was unusable for professional discussions due to the noise. Suppressed speech.
- 1y ago
- tstactplsignore 1y agoCirca 2018-2020, Twitter felt genuinely unique as a social media platform to find intelligent scientific and policy discussion. The quality of discussion in my feed felt much higher than reddit or HN. I could barely imagine leaving it. By 2024, that completely reversed, and it felt much so, so stupider than anywhere else. So many scientists have left. Eventually I left despite having 1000s of followers. Bluesky has recapitulated or even surpassed peak sci twitter. The signal:noise is excellent. However, it requires some work because there is no algorithm. Aggressively unfollow people with low signal:noise, use the custom feeds that disable reposts and enable replies, use the Quiet Posters feed, and use sill.social. This has created a science feed that for me surpasses even the peak of Twitter, let alone X today which is unusable for scientific discussion. Finally, the thing that drives me crazy is that Bluesky is literally a popular open-source, nonprofit, Ad-less, algorithm-less, truly free and partially decentralized social media network. It's what we all dreamed about in the 2010s! It's Mastodon but actually popular! But half the tech community have convinced themselves it's a "liberal bubble" (that anyone can join....) and that the website that apparently isn't a bubble is the, err, website run by a billionaire with an algorithm designed to promote certain political content that agrees with that billionaire. Absolutely bizarre situation.
- subulation 1y ago[flagged]
- otterley 1y agoLike what?
- booleandilemma 1y agoI've stayed with X, just because it still seems like that's where stuff is talked about. If and when that changes, I won't need an academic study to tell me so.
- TYPE_FASTER 1y agoMy Twitter account was hijacked earlier this year. I created it in 2007 using an e-mail address on a domain I've owned since 1999. Multiple attempts to recover the account have been rejected. I created a new account. Since I'm not following anybody, I see a random-ish feed of things. It's kinda jarring going from a feed of tech science music to misinformation getrichquick scams and reposted viral content. Like woah.
- DoneWithAllThat 1y agoSo they surveyed a few hundred people and that’s supposed to justify an academic paper? In a formerly prestigious journal (emphasis on the former - if you need evidence that it’s been co-opted by activists take a look at its home page).
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- gdbsjjdn 1y agoPersonally Twitter was very useful as a mid-career engineer to keep up to date on Bay Area developments and connect with my former coworkers. Several of my previous jobs were the result of Twitter DMs. At this point someone being a big Twitter user would be a deal breaker for joining their company.
- penguin202 1y ago[dead]
- outlore 1y agoa lot of tech and design conversations are happening on X. is there a way to mirror those on Bluesky?
- buyucu 1y agoTwitter was never professionally useful.
- rgibd 1y agoi have only read the title and synopsis, but weighing the professional value of personal microblogging platforms seems misguided , i wonder what the breakdown would be if linkedin (the "professional" microblogging platform, even as awful as it may be) were included , i would wager that it would be the winner. nevermind that "following academics" is something that sounds better than it actually is and reduces the individual to their profession. a more interesting question is where the dilettantes frequent
- cyanydeez 1y agoAre scientists stupid, this study says yesss....
- andrewclunn 1y agoIf either "reality has a liberal bias" or "scientific institutions have become ideologically captured" then something akin to this would make sense. Of course, how you would distinguish between the two I'm not sure.
- mattbettinson 1y agoFWIW- it seems tech is still firmly on X. I’ve made an account there recently (@ma_bettinson !) and the discussions are quite great, though there are quite a few grifters
- ManlyBread 1y agoBluesky is constantly bleeding users so even if this is true it won't be relevant for long. https://blueskyfeeds.com/bluesky-user-growth?t=3m https://blueskyfeeds.com/bluesky-user-growth?t=3m
- stavros 1y agoThat's too bad, does anyone know why?
- apwell23 1y agoyes. because "no fun allowed" is not very attractive.
- krapp 1y agoIt is to a certain kind of personality. Hacker News is very much "no fun allowed" and people here seem like it.
- apwell23 1y agoyes exactly. thats why hackernews is niche.
- skinnymuch 1y agoIn a recent post about todo apps almost all the comments use plain text. Hacker News is niche and tiny.
- mpalmer 1y agoWhat is it you'd like to be posting that you think you aren't allowed to?
- Sohcahtoa82 1y agoI see plenty of "fun" on Blue Sky. What "fun" is not allowed? Be explicit.
- ilikehurdles 1y agoThe are fewer posters and likes on bluesky today than there were in early September of last year, and both graphs have been trending down consistently since February of this year. Bs went from 2.8m likers/day its peak to 1.1m today. Yes certain so-called scientific fields that have a 100% viewpoint capture in academia only feel comfortable sharing views in the bluesky bubble, and they’re the exclusively-BA schools like “Integrative Biology” that this paper is published in.
- dgacmu 1y agoThis is not true? https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats There was a huge bump of new users right after the election, and things have gone down since then, but they are still much higher than they were in September 2024. And if you look at the tail of the graph, it seems to be holding pretty steady, which is about what you would expect for a social network after a huge spike of growth: not all of those users will stick around.
- qwe----3 1y agoAll the trends look downward to me?
- MacsHeadroom 1y agoAccording to these stats there's around 10% fewer daily likers than last September and 30% fewer daily posters. Bluesky is dead lol.
- 8cvor6j844qw_d6 1y agoBluesky seems unfriendly to email-alias providers like SimpleLogin. I signed up with an alias and was suspended within minutes. bsky.app email support [1] requested me to contact them via blueskyweb.xyz email instead [2], but mail from aliases appears dropped by blueskyweb.xyz. Gave up creating an account after being given the runaround. In contrast, Mastodon have worked fine for me. [1]: https://bsky.social/about/support https://bsky.social/about/support [2]: https://bsky.social/about/blog/09-18-2024-trust-safety-update https://bsky.social/about/blog/09-18-2024-trust-safety-updat...
- OneDeuxTriSeiGo 1y agoThe mainline bluesky "mushroom" PDS have been struggling with an influx of spam and bot accounts so they've gotten a bit picky on email addresses (which I partially get but also find quite frustrating). Luckily there are alternative PDS that you can use without issue. Tangled[1] (the atproto github host) is one. They are a smaller PDS host so the usual caveats apply (if you act up they are more likely to notice you, downtime may occur, etc) but otherwise you can use them like you would any other PDS to interact with bluesky and the greater atproto network. 1. https://tangled.sh/signup https://tangled.sh/signup
- JohnTHaller 1y agoI regularly block throwaway email providers from PortableApps.com as that's where most of the genuinely awful community members come from. Racists screeds, death threats, and porn, oh my. The spammers, on the other hand, almost all use Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook, Yahoo.
- wonderwonder 1y agoBlue Sky has far more moderation. Unfortunately some of that includes limiting political view points. I always looked at BlueSky as reddit lite from that perspective. Their "respect others" rule appears to primarily apply to protecting left of center posters. Academia as a whole is left of center so I understand the overlap there. X has almost no moderation. Its the wild wild west. You can read a thoughtful post about nutrition followed by outright antisemitism. X is the free speech platform, almost anything goes. I am a free speech maximalist though, my only limit being personal threats of violence, targeted attacks (revenge porn, pornographic image manipulation, doxxing, etc. ) other than that whatever people want to say or ideas they want to push should be debated in the public space. No censorship. Freedom of speech of course does not mean freedom from consequence. If I am spouting racist diatribe under my real name and lose my job, that's on me. I prefer X as I like being exposed to all sorts of view points and find the more extreme posts amusing as its not something you see on the daily. I'm a jew and at one point the algorithm seemed to think I was an open neo-nazi. Was pretty funny, did not bother me at all. Each to their own, the nice thing is that there are options.
- cmxch 1y agoBlueSky isn’t mere “moderation”, it is a narrative security ops platform that has the feature of social networking. It distills the worst of Reddit practices and makes them available at greater speed and scale. X on the other hand, has a far lighter touch, opting to cutting back the ability to silence at scale and speed.
- Arubis 1y agoI’m glad to see folks moving off Xitter. But this feels like just repeating the same mistake by moving to a VC-funded centralized platform. What prevents ActivityPub from being technically sufficient—or is this just the network effect in action?
- krapp 1y agoIt's the network effect in action - most people just wanted "Twitter without Elon's bullshit" and Bluesky provided that. Mastodon is great but most of the arguments for using Mastodon over Bluesky are honestly arguments most people don't care about, and the Mastodon community can be aggressive and hostile to newcomers, which is great for sustaining a community and preserving your culture against Eternal September but not great for onboarding new people.
- cmxch 1y agoThat’s fine. If they want a hugbox, then they can have one. But if they want scientific or public facing discourse, they will have to leave it.
- wakawaka28 1y agoBluesky is dead, Mastodon is hardly any more popular. Neither X nor any of these should have ever been of scientific value. If you want to publish science, use a standard blog platform like a normal person and curate a RSS feed of stuff you like.
- whamlastxmas 1y agoThis seems factually incorrect? There are massively more scientists on X than bluesky, and they seem to engage in their profession on X all the time. The scientists I know personally are actually using LinkedIn the most for discussions around their work, and extremely rarely using any platform other than LinkedIn for this