Hacker News Reader

Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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I don't know about all scientific fields, but my own field (information security and cryptography) used to have a huge and vigorous community. My timeline now looks like a ghost town.

Worse than that, community participation operates based on network effects. A 7% loss of participants can have a much greater effect on the overall intensity of communication.

Mastodon's infosec.exchange is doing genuinely well. It's not the infosec Twitter of the olden days, but it's the most promising replacement we've got.

Needs a 140 character limit really. An exploit is far more fun if you can root someone's stuff inside 1 tweet.

The Neuroscience community used to be vibrant and active on twitter, and now is sad and lonely with only a few extremely active voices left. The heaviest posters before are still there, and the extremely long tail seems to have left the conversation.

> the extremely long tail seems to have left the conversation.

The long tail leaving I suspect is because unless you are verified, your tweets will be seen by almost nobody.

Post a few tweets that get just 1 view, and you will soon be demoralized and stop tweeting.

The new 'pay for ad impressions' scheme encourages twitter to direct more impressions at smaller and unverified tweeters. They don't have to pay out money for those impressions after all.

That scheme is ostensibly designed to encourage regulars to post*. The point of it is to grow the platform by Encouraging regular generation of new content, in order to attract a broader audience. If the people in question never see the money, it’s counter-productive because then they will be the one leaving or reducing their activity. So no, it does not encourage Twitter to have more less active users.

* I’m being generous here and consider that this was a genuine strategic decision, and not just “let’s cut a check to my nazi friend”.

True - and that would be the case if all users would be paid for ad impressions.

But when 99% of users are unverified, and you only do ad revenue sharing with the verified users who have over 5 million impressions (ie. a small fraction of a small fraction), the vast majority of users have no incentive to post good content.

That strategy worked for youtube though - youtube only pays out money to a tiny tiny fraction of users, many of whom work almost full time being a professional content creator.

> That strategy worked for youtube though - youtube only pays out money to a tiny tiny fraction of users, many of whom work almost full time being a professional content creator.

Yeah I think this was more or less the model. And it seems to work quite well. But then again, with Musk, who knows?

With tweets, he might do better to pay a few million users 10 bucks each than pay a few thousand users $10,000 each.

Who are you referring to with "Nazi friend"? (I guess I would agree, just wondering)

(Maybe you meant Kayne West:

"Elon Musk reinstates Kanye West [...]"

"antisemitic rants ... he tweeted an image of a swastika ... praised Adolf Hitler and the Nazis ..."

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/jul/30/elon-musk-rein...)

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!)"

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.

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.

In which case, the headline could be "7% of scientists have moved from twitter to other platforms. Could this be the start of a grand exodus?"

The full headline was too long to post. The headline is: "Thousands of scientists are cutting back on Twitter, seeding angst and uncertainty"

I think "seeding" is pretty directly in line with "could this be the start". Plus, they aren't really even getting at any kind of "grand exodus" here. That's not what this article is about. It's about there being no one place that is a clearinghouse for new scientific research to be posted, that is, a fragmenting of the community.

so you're correct! they used your idea. but they aren't getting at a "grand exodus" in any case, just the platform itself no longer being an effective place on which scientific researchers would singularly focus .

The headline could just as easily be that 93% of scientists are sticking with Twitter. There's plenty of room for framing with a survey like this.

> how would you characterize "the sentiment of the headline"?

Imagine it rewritten as "3% of scientists contacted by us said they were cutting back on Twitter".

> how would you characterize "the sentiment of the headline"?

A lot of scientists are abandoning Twitter, and this is a significant development.

In reality, they could only talk to a tiny minority of people they tried to (which by itself causes selection bias - if I were ok with Twitter, I wouldn't talk to journalists about it, but if I had an ax to grind, I'd surely jump at the chance) - who are also a tiny minority of all Twitter users. And of those that did respond, they had about half using Twitter less (how much less? why? maybe they are busy doing, you know, actual science, instead of tweeting?) - what does it tell us? Pretty much nothing. But they are trying to build a narrative from it:

The survey from Nature asked whether people had changed their use of Twitter in the past six months and why. The reasons respondents gave varied, but many of those who had markedly reduced or stopped their activity on X mentioned Musk’s management of the platform. Many said that they had noticed an uptick in the amount of fake accounts, trolls and hate speech on the platform. Žiga Malek, an environmental scientist at the Free University of Amsterdam, mentioned in the survey that he had started seeing a lot of “strange” political far-right accounts espousing science denialism and racism in his feed.

The message is clear: Musk removed the censorship and now far-right fascist racist trolls took over twitter and the scientists are fleeing from it. We need much more censorship - especially, political censorship - on the social media, or the science (especially female researchers struggling with inequity!) is doomed. That's the sentiment embedded in the message. That's why this article is written, actually.

> But they are trying to build a narrative from it:

I feel like the reality is that it has less to do with unbanning a bunch of alt-right trolls and more having to do with changes to tweet discoverability and blue-checks.

It's not hard to find people even in this thread complaining about how their feed has turned into a "ghost town," which foots with complaints I've heard from my Twitter-using acquaintances. That is a serious problem for a site that used to function as a shared social space.

It very well may be so, but Nature chooses to highlight exactly the "alt-right trolls" aspect of it, and pretty much brings no other possible reasons why it could be happening. Especially hilarious part is when they explain how Twitter is very important because "Scientists could discuss suspicions of research fraud, often anonymously" - when we fully know that Twitter has been consistently hunting down and removing any dissent from the self-appointed "scientific consensus", even about topics that we already know where the "consensus" was wrong (such as the question of COVID origins), and that an anonymous complaint about something that is considered part of the "consensus" would most certainly be dismissed as "troll". Even blue-checks could have been de-checked and suppressed for dissenting take on a "consensus" topic, but an anonymous there'd be no chance. But the important part is that "Twitter helped to raise awareness and accountability for concepts such as scientific colonialism". I mean, this article is positively stuffed with political references and shibboleths (which all lean to one side, of course), it's impossible to take it as any kind of neutral non-political research about what is happening with twitter.

Maybe, but the truth is that Twitter is not doing okay. It hasn't been doing okay ever since Elon bought the site, and it's because his purchase saddled the company with so much debt that he basically had no choice but to drastically change course.

In other words, the pretense that the site is doing just fine and that reports of its death are being overblown by a bunch of people with political axes to grind is _also_ a narrative, and one that simply doesn't foot with reality.

> It hasn't been doing okay ever since Elon bought the site

No, it hasn't been doing ok way before that, if you accept the criteria that the article purports to have (like supporting scientific discussion and surfacing complaints of dissenters, ignored by the mainstream sources) as the face value. Of course, that would be silly, because the real purpose of the article is to say "see, a bad man from the bad tribe took over Twitter and it's all awful now".

> because his purchase saddled the company with so much debt that he basically had no choice but to drastically change course.

He didn't hide his intentions to "change course" from the start. So it's not something that anything forced him to do - it's something that he bought it for. You can argue he was wrong to want it, but it's certainly was the goal, not a consequence of debt or anything else.

> the pretense that the site is doing just fine and that reports of its death are being overblown by a bunch of people with political axes to grind is _also_ a narrative

Of course. To argue against this narrative, one has to define what "just fine" means. I saw useful links on twitter before (occasionally), I see them now in pretty much the same quantity. Is it fine for me? Sure. Somebody got their safe space bubble ruined. Is it fine for them? Probably not. How do I generalize that? I don't know. I certainly know people with political axes to grind are significant part of the crowd claiming it's not fine, and this article provides massive amount of evidence for that. But yes, I do not know if there are other significant groups of people whose problems are of non-political nature, and how big these groups of people are and how vital their presence for twitter. This article is no help to me in that question.

> I saw useful links on twitter before (occasionally), I see them now in pretty much the same quantity.

You and I actually use Twitter in the same way. The era of Elon's ownership is the most unreliable the site has been since the days of the Fail Whale. The recent reliability fails have been publicized and obvious to those who engage with the site, and I've anecdotally noticed an uptick in the use of twitter proxies like fxtwitter, vxtwitter, nitter, threadreader, and others to help make twitter posts more available and reliable.

This is on top of the other existential threats to the site. The company is still mired in an enormous amount of debt. The site cannot attract even the marginal ad spend that the previous ownership managed. Threads has yet to release a publicly available web interface. BlueSky has yet to leave private beta.

So I feel very justified in saying that Twitter has not been doing okay since the Elon purchase, and I didn't even have to bring partisanship into the equation.

I think a lot of scientists are moving to Mastodon, but sometimes doubling their accounts. I am quite pleased with the feed that I’m getting on Mastodon now

>Especially when 90% of those asked didn't answer the survey at all - upset users are probably more likely to respond to the survey.

Alternatively: many of the 90% didn't answer because they have already left Twitter.

The users were contacted by email, not by twitter message.

You may be right that some users saw a survey about twitter in their inbox and thought "I've already left, therefore I'm not the target audience for that survey".

Or are upset but don't want to spend any more cycles on the topic.

Or maybe they are all dead from Elon Musk taking over twitter. If you don't need to support your assumptions with data, any wild one would do.

> Half using it less than before isn't surprising if the other half are using it same or more than before.

There's a breakdown of responses in a chart included in the article:

- 6.7% stopped usage

- 24% significantly decreased usage

- 23.3% slightly decreased usage

- 37.3% have been about the same

- 6% have slightly increased usage

- 2.8% have significantly increased usage

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