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It 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 Tw

It 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.

matthewdgreen 1y ago
Bluesky isn't perfect, and I actually find it kind of annoying, but it's a "follow who you want" place. If your timeline is strident, that's because you followed people who are strident. The same isn't really true of Twitter, where even the "Following" timeline shows you algorithmically-recommended content and then boosts the replies of paying customers (AKA scammers.) To get the same feature from X, you need to do something complicated with "Lists", and it doesn't fix the reply ordering problem. The rest of your comment tells me that you don't really spend a lot of time with scientists, but you do spend a lot of time developing your opinions from social media. I wish you could do the opposite! Academics are great and funny and sometimes wrong about social issues just like other people, but they also work on some of the coolest problems we have.

matthewdgreen 1y ago

Bluesky isn't perfect, and I actually find it kind of annoying, but it's a "follow who you want" place. If your timeline is strident, that's because you followed people who are strident. The same isn't really true of Twitter, where even the "Following" timeline shows you algorithmically-recommended content and then boosts the replies of paying customers (AKA scammers.) To get the same feature from X, you need to do something complicated with "Lists", and it doesn't fix the reply ordering problem. The rest of your comment tells me that you don't really spend a lot of time with scientists, but you do spend a lot of time developing your opinions from social media. I wish you could do the opposite! Academics are great and funny and sometimes wrong about social issues just like other people, but they also work on some of the coolest problems we have.