Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place
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It has apparent value propositions past the social network, but none of those use cases are visibly taking off and none of them appear to be monetizable. The social network itself is what will be evaluated when they go out for more funding. And I don't see how you can raise at all for a social network in 2026 with flat numbers, let alone the declining numbers Bluesky actually has.
I've been dual-wielding Twitter and Bluesky for about a year (after a year off Twitter where I was mostly Mastodon), and, anecdatally, we've hit a point where the engagement and volume of stuff I see in Bluesky is lower than what I was getting even on Mastodon. Earlier on, there was some truth to the idea that Twitter had a much larger audience, but you'd get better engagement on Bluesky. I now get better engagement on Twitter. I can see people I had followed into Bluesky moving back to Twitter.
I have no idea what's going to happen, but I'm curious to hear a coherent story about how Bluesky isn't cooked.
I really dislike Mastodon so gave that up a while back. I know there are a few people I'd like to follow who only post there, but such is life.
I wanted to like BlueSky, but it's such a bizarre echo chamber of people who left Twitter for ideological reasons that it basically filters for people that I actively don't want to engage with.
Those types of people are still there on Twitter (mostly on the other side these days), but I don't see them because the algorithm filters them out.
People who are incapable of finding content without a "discovery" or "for you" feed get what they deserve.
If this is a typical attitude to the new user experience, no wonder Bluesky isn’t succeeding.
That's part of the problem, I'm not sure that actually does anything.
Bluesky doesn't really present it that way. The default "Discover" feed at least pretends to be exactly that.
> it'll take a couple days of actual effort, but it's extremely easy to prune your main feed into looking how you want it to look
I think this has changed recently. Months ago I tried to actually use Bluesky, and my Discover feed was awful. 90% of my time on the site was muting/blocking or thinking "show more/less like this" did something and it was an miserable experience which nothing seemed to improve except quitting it.
Checking it now, it's dramatically better. Still includes a lot of content I don't want, but less aggressively so, although that seems to largely be that I was gone so far it could be mostly content from accounts I follow.
If it takes a couple of days of actual effort, then it’s not extremely easy, especially for the average user who can just go to Threads with their existing Instagram account and not be bombarded with furry and diaper porn.
> I've found Bluesky does a really bad job at not showing me stuff I don't want to see. Furry p*rn on the "cute internet cats" feed? Yup.
— https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45397250
> i kept getting weird sexual posts of dudes in diapers, no matter how much i blocked or asked not to see that.
Unlike X, blue sky defaults to simply showing you a feed of the people you follow, in chronological order.
This is the best way to use the app
Usage has absolutely declined from peak switching periods where inevitibly some users won't stick around, but that's to be expected. Most stats seem to be leveling off (which isn't exactly stable growth either so the rest of your points stand).
I understand that as a Bluesky user the peak and dropoff doesn't hurt the experience. But investors are going to put money in with the expectation of a return and what they're going to look at are the derivatives of the adoption curve: how quickly is it gaining users, and is adoption accelerating?
What's probably true is that if they found a stable source of revenue they wouldn't have to answer these kinds of questions. But this is just back to my original point, of "I don't see how this is going to work", because I don't see how they're going to do that.
I'd be happy if someone jumped in and set me straight with a clear and plausible plan. To me, though, from the information I've seen, it looks like the premise here is that they're going to raise again, and to do that they're going to need to demonstrate accelerating growth, which they starkly do not have right now.
If it helps, nothing I'm saying has anything to do with whether ATProto will succeed. ATProto could succeed (and fulfill one possible overarching goal of the PBC) and Bluesky would still not be a long-term viable forum for scientific communication (because it will stop existing in its current form).
That just isn't a "sharp decline" no matter how much you seem to want to repeat those words.
Last year in November they had around 1.3MM posters. Today, 0.65MM.
Followers: 3MM, to 0.4MM today.
I'm not rooting for them to fail. I use Bluesky. I find Twitter's ownership odious and the platform significantly worse than it was 4 years ago.
But if we're talking about scientific communicators talking about where the future of scientific communication is going to happen, it is relevant whether Bluesky has a long-term future. There's another non-Twitter social network that doesn't operate under this funding pressure!
A presidential election spike is the baseline for tracking growth in a social media platform??
What’s “user stock”? Is that the number of registered accounts? Isn’t it basically impossible for that to do anything but go up? It’s the number of people actively using the network that’s the important figure, not the total number of people who ever used it.
Are these the figures you are reporting?
> We made a new Bluesky stats page to see how the platform is growing. Unfortunately it is currently shrinking.
> Last week the total number of users registered hit 36M, but actually only 13M of those showed any activity in the last 90 days.
> Bluesky User Stats/Growth: https://bluefacts.app/bluesky-user-growth
— https://www.reddit.com/r/BlueskySocial/comments/1kxib89/blue...
Right now that shows 5.6M MAUs.
> The number of active users (posting, liking or following) is down by 6.3% compared to 12 weeks ago.
> The number of unique accounts posting at least once a day is down by 5.6% compared to 12 weeks ago.
> The number of posts created each day is down by 4.3% compared to 12 weeks ago.
> The number of likes given each day is up by 0.3% compared to 12 weeks ago.
> The number of users liking posts each day is down by 6.1% compared to 12 weeks ago.
> The number of new follows each day is down by 19.3% compared to 12 weeks ago.
Also check the account age stats:
https://bluefacts.app/bluesky-account-age
> 32.1K New accounts per day since the beginning
> 23.7K New accounts per day in the last 30 days
> 14K New accounts per day in the last 7 days
New accounts per day appears to be getting much worse over time.
Last year in August they had 150k posters. Today they have 650k.
Followers: 50k to 400k today
It looks like Bluesky is going to be shedding active for the near future, probably settling around a million users active per day.
Odd. Here's another BlueSky stats page, and almost every metric is in the red.
Do you have any data to back this up?
Also famously twitter is losing value and advertisers and users still it’s not stopped twitter from existing
Regarding engagement doesn’t twitter have lot more low quality engagement vs Bkuesky
If it's in a stronger financial position today, it's almost entirely because of the merger with xAI.
Are you an insider? Where are the numbers?
how_long_can_bluesky_exists = f(usage, headcount, funding)
Three parameters and you supplied zero of them.
It does sound like you just randomly picked a number 2026 and proceeded to rant on how little engagement you received on Bluesky.
You can generally take a headcount number and assign a fully loaded cost to it (say, $200k, conservatively) and just math it out. And of course that analysis assumes their infra expenditures round to zero.
So no, I'm not just making stuff up. I could be wrong! I feel like I was open about that.
Nate Silver has basically zero juice on Bluesky, people go there to get away from that sort of "expert" that's got a huge profile already but is hard to escape if you are uninterested in his takes.
I mean he'll, take his own word on it, it's not the social network for him!
Plenty of big accounts have anecdotally said they have much better engagement on bsky than twitter
The usage numbers I've seen are down from their peak last November but have mostly stabilized at this point. The devs say they have multiple years of runway, and each time there is an exodus from twitter the numbers have a sharp increase and then decline to a stable number higher than they started.
13 months ago there were 200k daily likers and now there are 1.2 million. Yes, that is down from the highest peak directly after the election, but the 1.2 million has been fairly steady for the past ~4 months and if there's one thing you can count on it's Elon doing something stupid to piss off users and cause another user exodus. That one will cause another peak and slow decline but if it's like every other one he's caused the end result will be higher numbers for bsky than before.
They were linked in the thread by the person complaining about them in an ancestor of your comment.
> if there's one thing you can count on it's Elon doing something stupid to piss off users and cause another user exodus. That one will cause another peak and slow decline but if it's like every other one he's caused the end result will be higher numbers for bsky than before.
Only seeing growth when Musk does something stupid, and most of the new users not sticking around are strong signals it doesn’t have long-term value. Bluesky is the rebound social network.
One thing that often gets overlooked is that Twitter itself was on pretty shaky financial ground (and likely still is, though being private now makes that harder to know). Even if Bluesky managed to absorb the entirety of Twitter’s user base, it’s still unclear whether that translates into a strong business model.
Yes: Plenty of criticism has been aimed at how Twitter was run, and maybe Bluesky is managed more effectively right now, but there's no evidence to suggest Bluesky would be run significantly better at that scale.
(To be clear, I’m not disputing that Silver thinks BlueSky is failing—I’ll take your word for that—I’m disputing that he’s doing so because he had an axe to grind rather than data backing him up.)
Also ignoring that Bluesky isn’t dependent on any company in the long term.
Also, linkedin says 53 people, though crazies like to say they're employed places. It does say 29 in the US so that's more likely real. Assuming that skews eng a bit, that's probably (225 fully loaded eng, 150 fully loaded the rest) $6m in payroll alone. Not to mention server expenses. That's tough.
The case for more funding: 1 - yolo; 2 - non-economic investments; 3 - Musk gonna Musk, so expect Twitter to further shed users. There may be a business to be built there if you can run significantly more efficiently than Twitter which was a shockingly poorly-operated business (Zuck was dead on re: the clown car. Except maybe more like a silver mine, not a gold mine.). Oh, and 4 - the EU is pretty hostile to Twitter and Threads, so maybe there's some there there. Dunno.
Admittedly- this does not sound like the investment thesis that raises 700mn usd. But! the larger goal of Bsky is to not be twitter, and to be a different type of social media. In general, its not going to be as good.
Whether there is a business model at the intersection of not-twitter and new social media, is to be discovered.
Taking a stab at it - I suppose the question is whether this can be converted into any sort of cheap subscription based model, which is efficient to run on long time horizons and so breaks even, long enough to keep attracting users, and offloading moderation tasks to user groups.
More broadly, Twitter’s problem is that it carpet bombed the bridge with a substantial portion of its intelligent population. I’m pretty sure half the tech, game dev, and research people I follow on Bluesky/Mastodon will not return under any circumstance, myself included.
What do you count as "engagement"? Views/likes? Those can be produced. Interesting conversations that aren't obviously LLM can't. That's the metric I use for anecdotally seeing Bluesky (and Mastodon) as immensely more engaging in a signal/noise ratio.
[1] - https://tobacco.stanford.edu/cigarettes/doctors-smoking/more...
Social media is very cultural here, so I'm not sure that we are representative of a larger trend in social media acceptance worldwide.
[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/578364/countries-with-mo...
Social networks, systems where you talk to your friends, are okay (probably). Social media, where you consume content selected by an algorithm, is not.
And was basically driven by social network companies saturating organic friend content volume (and viewer eyeball time).
So they turned into social media companies driven by infinite synthetic (in the no-connection sense) content.
The Fediverse will only be popular if someone releases a client that makes it as easy to use as X and Bluesky. Not sure if it's technically feasible (I don't know much about the innards of the protocol) but it doesn't seem to have happened at the moment.
But this is off-topic, because the ToS changes are mostly about porn, while this HN submission is about the professional use of Bluesky.
It's difficult to fund rapid development at the scale needed, with that hobble.
When I started on Mastodon I created an account for each instance I wanted to post to, which was slightly annoying but not much more complicated than signing up for different subreddits. Now I have my own hosted account and follow whomever I like from there. Of course you can follow any account from any account (if the admin hasn't blocked it.)
This is an improvement for average user onboarding - although if almost everyone clicks mastodon.social, you kind of lose the value of decentralization, right?
Having it take longer to form an opinion isn't exactly a negative either. The longer you take to pick a new server, the longer that server will have been around, and the longer it'll likely continue to be around.
That's simply not true. All servers maintain blacklists of other servers they don't like and won't federate with, including mastodon.social: https://mastodon.social/about (last section, "Moderated servers")
You could argue that it's normal to block problematic servers, but it's not you the user who gets to define what is problematic, it's your server. Therefore your choice of server may very well prevent you from seeing content you'd like to see.
How is this any different than users of different IRC networks being unable to communicate with each other?
If I'm on OFTC, I certainly don't complain about not being able to talk to people on Libera.chat. I just....join the server and start talking.
You solve the problem of multiple servers on Mastodon the same way you do on IRC - with a Mastodon client. If anything, it's _much_ easier to keep track of multiple accounts on Mastodon than it is on IRC.
If you really cannot go beyond your inclination, and since you are a a long-time Internet user and a nerd, why not host your own instance?
There's already way more stuff on Mastodon for the hashtags I follow than I can possibly consume. If this is "unpopular", I'm happy with the way things are.
Maybe it _should_ be a little tougher to sign up for than the other mainstream options.
This is the reason why it was a pain. You or I might think "this is a decentralized platform, I should look at all the servers and find the best one for me" and immediately get choice paralysis looking at who has what rules, who federates with who, who runs which one, etc. An average user will probably stick to the main instance and not even think about it.
I was in the same boat as you, and my experience was completely different. Mastodon's federation model reminded me of IRC, except nowhere near as balkanized.
So how did I wrangle the supposed complexity? I started out on one of the main instances and just started people-watching. Over time, I took note of which server contained users whose content I enjoyed over time, then I just joined the server.
Joining the server got me a slower federated feed that was both more pertinent to my interests that also functioned as a de-facto community space. I also found the moderation to be more to my own preferences. But the bigger server wasn't _bad_, I just preferred the smaller server because it was more personable.
I don't use Mastodon much anymore, but that's more because a good chunk of my social circle left for BlueSky than any gripes I had with the platform. I don't know where they will go if BlueSky goes belly up, but I can tell you that it won't be back to Twitter.
Only if you expect to be there for ever even as they inevitably enshittify. Be under no illusion that although BlueSky is having its "first they are good to their users" phase now, it is temporary.
So make the most of it now while it's good, but be prepared to move on when that changes. Embracing impermanence is a smarter play. This is nothing new, thus passes all social media.
Decentralization is not a priority for most people. If anything, they actively want centralization, because it's easier. To get those people to decentralize, the solution will have to be dead easy and invisible. The AT Protocol being developed by the Bluesky people looks promising.
I don't work for Bluesky, I'm not on Bluesky, and I don't particularly care, but I found your comment unfair after reading about ATProto on HN literally yesterday.
It really feels like an "eating your cake and having it too" kinda situation: you get the engagement and interaction with millions of Threads users but you don't have to count them in your decentralization metrics.
Eg. searching 'Anthony Albanese Bluesky' for Australia's leader has a link to X, with custom integrated previews, above the Bluesky link of the PM despite the search explicitly stating Bluesky and despite the account posting to Bluesky.
It's hard for anyone to move over since the lack of engagement is rigged like this.
Duckduckgo and Bing put the bluesky link as #1 for the above. Seems straightforward to make the switch to me. If you haven't changed your browsers default search engine in the past 5 years now's a good time to do so. Much better results await.
The kagi assistant is also nice, only responding with AI when you add a question mark to your query, with the option of opening the query in a separate web search RAG w/the LLM of your choice
The rest of us are just writing papers, presenting at conferences, collaborating with other research groups without any interest in putting it all out there on social media.
This whole X versus Bluesky thing is basically irrelevant. Neither of these platforms are good venues for dissemination of scientific research.
These "platforms", i.e. other peoples' gigantic websites, are fantasy worlds that cater to self-aggrandisement where relevance requires a presence in that world
The outside world, aka the real world, is under represented and thus ignored
If you have heard of Metcalfe's Law, you'll understand why this is not good for Twitter long term.
Scientist tend to form their own closed communities anyway.
Do you have a source for that?
SaaS, maybe. Tech, absolutely not.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40637733/
See also: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02554-0
Co-author Shiffman recommended Twitter in 2012 and 2013
https://davidshiffmancv.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Shiff...
https://arxiv.org/abs/1305.0435
He even required his students at ASU to use Twitter as recently as 2023
https://davidshiffmancv.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Shiff...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45388021
Protip: BlueSky is "decentralized" only in name. Don't. With all their drawbacks, ActivityPub and Nostr are way better.
The comments took issue with the conclusion
Related:
Bluesky now platform of choice for science community
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45039397
Scientists No Longer Find X Professionally Useful, and Have Switched to Bluesky
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44978815
Science research gets more engagement on Bluesky than X, study finds
This are just the last three Social Media I subscribed in the past and range from Stagnant to Pretty Much Dead.
I suppose that the problem is that if you already have 1000+ followers on, say, Twitter or IG you try posting the same stuff in parallel on both... after 1 month of doubled effort you notice that your followers on the new platform is an order of magnitude smaller... you want to stop double posting because it is too time consuming. Guess which one you will opt out of?
[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016517652...
X seems to know this is a problem. They hired Nikita Bier who is posting claims that the algorithm is being improved to favor people sharing best in class knowledge every day, but the current meta appears to be posting controversial hot takes that are easily argued or debunked. Tricking your followers into fact checking you is a game in itself because it generates engagement and therefore extends reach. This is why some accounts are deliberate exaggerating facts or posting known misinformation now.
That said, I have a hard time believing everyone is migrating to BlueSky instead of simply leaving this type of social media. Bluesky feels relatively dead except for the few accounts playing the BlueSky meta game, which is largely about infighting and creating hyper cliques from what I see.
One account I follow went to BlueSky but then returned to X because he couldn’t stand it. He described BlueSky as the place to go if you wanted to be constantly attacked by people who 98% agree with you. My impression is that it’s a smaller pond where the people who were previously small fish on X see it as their opportunity to fight their way to the top of a smaller food chain. It just feels ugly and mean half the time. I’ve had to unfollow a lot of people on BlueSky who I previously enjoyed on X because they got sucked into the BlueSky toxicity competition and now they’re just taking swipes at other people on BlueSky all day instead of posting info I wanted to see.
only thing that seems to be missing from bluesky migration is athletes and that's probably because it cannot be monetized (well not easily)
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1970336290148434391
I am constantly surprised by the amount of people who enjoy drivel, but this has always been like this. Only we used to also have printed media that held itself to higher ideals than tabloids and worked as a counter weight to them. What is different atm is that for a long time there haven't been social media that shoot for higher ideals. Maybe bsky is that?
The market for tabloid social media is already saturated by meta, tiktok, x, snapchat, and the like. It would be interesting if bsky could find their own market with the more "serious" end of the media spectrum.
It's much more visible now, though. In the past it was quite easy to ignore the entire existence of someone like Rupert Murdoch but now the entire world knows what Musk is. He just appeared in last week at a rally of 100,000 people encouraging them to violently overthrowing the government. He appeared in the oval office giving speeches. Murdoch usually kept to himself.
> Scientists in the United States are more politically liberal than the general population. This fact has fed charges of political bias. To learn more about scientists’ political behavior, we analyze publicly available Federal Election Commission data. We find that scientists who donate to federal candidates and parties are far more likely to support Democrats than Republicans, with less than 10 percent of donations going to Republicans in recent years. The same pattern holds true for employees of the academic sector generally, and for scientists employed in the energy sector. This was not always the case: Before 2000, political contributions were more evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. We argue that these observed changes are more readily explained by changes in Republican Party attitudes toward science than by changes in American scientists. We reason that greater public involvement by centrist and conservative scientists could help increase trust in science among Republicans.
Is discussing alternative platforms to Elon Musk's X now too "political" for HN?
I stopped posting on Twitter around the acquisition but kept my account. When I do randomly check my timeline I’m genuinely disturbed by the disinformation and pseudo-science, especially in machine learning.
This behavior is common enough that it creates a chilling effect for anyone who disagrees. Why take the time to craft a reply correcting the poster if it will likely be hidden from everyone? And so you end up with echo chambers.
The effect is quite stunning on some topics. For example: Quite a few people on Bluesky believe the Trump assassination attempt in Pennsylvania was staged[1], that the Charlie Kirk assassin's text messages are fake[2][3], and that the recent ICE shooter was a false flag.[4][5][6] Notice the amount of engagement these posts have. Thousands of likes, with little to no disagreement in the replies. The lack of feuding is what allows people to believe these falsehoods.
1. https://bsky.app/profile/jlyncochran.bsky.social/post/3ldy2f...
2. https://bsky.app/profile/cwebbonline.com/post/3lyzvxijtmc2f
3. https://bsky.app/profile/cwebbonline.com/post/3lyz22btupk2k
4. https://bsky.app/profile/junlper.beer/post/3lzlxfrqguc2k
5. https://bsky.app/profile/realtexaspaul.com/post/3lzlwg2ueic2...
6. https://bsky.app/profile/gilmored85.bsky.social/post/3lzm53d...
And the issue is bigger than it looks since blocking is public, so blocking gets you on lists of users to block so you'll be blocked by people you never interacted with for blocking/disagreeing with someone.
I don't know that I really want to interact with anyone who uses a block list like that, but it definitely would make echo chambers worse.
The incentive structure is the same as larger discussions. If anything, a smaller community makes it easier to create echo chambers, as you need to block fewer people before reaching epistemic closure.
Especially when they try to lean on their status as scientists in order to try and have their opinions be more influential.
The cdc for example saying it's ok to disregard their previous guidance in order to protest for black lives matter is one of these credibility damaging moments that is hard to undo.
How do they do that?
In general, it makes scientists look really naive and makes them lose credibility when they talk about actual science.
Other than that, I don't think it's right to tell them not to use their status to influence politics and society towards what they perceive as making the world better. On the contrary, they might have some duty to do just that.
>And it’s usually some controversial thing that doesn’t have to do with science anyway.
What evidence do you have that most scientists are giving opinions about things unrelated to their expertise and then stating you should trust them more due to their expertise or position?
When these experts go into politics and activism, their biases show and consequently the credibility of them and their unfortunate colleagues who don’t go into politics get lowered.
> What evidence do you have that most scientists are giving opinions about things unrelated to their expertise and then stating you should trust them more due to their expertise or position?
I don’t live under a rock.
What if the issue is related to their expertise?
Veering out of the lane implies they start offering their opinion about a topic that has nothing to do with their field after discussing one that does without making a clear disclaimer
>credibility of them and their unfortunate colleague
It's wrong to judge all due to the actions of some. This is a huge flaw of people in general but I wanted to mention it.
NTA but I think one example which deserves far more scrutiny than it gets is all the public health experts[1] in the early months of COVID who were telling people to stay inside, don't gather in groups even if you're outside, don't go to church etc only to suddenly change their minds and say that gathering in large groups is actually very safe as soon as the protests surrounding the murder of george floyd happened. This is a topic they have expertise on (or at least they claim to) so it's certainly within their lane, but the abrupt change in policy was obviously motivated by their political leanings and it did *a lot* to hurt their personal credibility as well as perceptions of the pandemic in general.
[1] IDK how many of them should actually be considered 'experts' as this is not a field I follow, but they were presented as such in the media and so that is how they are perceived.
Yes. Which is what this discussion I replied to was about. The claim was experts using their status to claim expertise in opinions unrelated to their field, not whether they changed their opinions on subjects they are experts at.
March - The CDC publishes Covid guidelines on mass gathering in March “Interim Guidance: Get Your Mass Gatherings or Large Community Events Ready for COVID-19”
May 26th - The George Floyd protests start
June 4th - The CDC directory tells congress he fears the protests could be a Covid seeding event [1]
June 12th - The CDC publishes new Covid guidelines on mass gatherings [2] due to the protests
------------------------------
You claim the change from the CDC was abrupt.
1. The CDC already had guidelines in place for mass gatherings before the protest started so new guidelines aren't abrupt and the new guidelines came out 16 days after the protests started
2. The Floyd protests were very emotional as indicated by rioting and arson in some cities. The CDC can't stop protestors but it can attempt to reduce the spread of Covid by offering updated guidelines that take into account the protests
For example, the director brought up tear gas as it would cause more coughing [same hearing as [1]] as something specific to protests
------------------------------
You also claimed there was a political aspect to it, that it was convenient the CDC issued those guidelines.
1. The director specifically stated that the protests only increased the possibility of Covid spreading. by calling them a potential seeding event.
2. The director at the time, Robert Redfield, is a Republican appointed by Trump in 2018.
[1]“I do think there is a potential, unfortunately, for this to be a seeding event" [referring to the protests] Robert Redfield, House Appropriations hearing, June 4th 2020
[2] CDC "Considerations for events and gatherings"
Things like this is what most people saw at the time, resulting in public health officials losing credibility overall. Let’s not whitewash history here.
The difference here is about the reality of how the public views things as opposed to some ideal where everyone goes to the CDC website for guidance.
And it's not just the talking heads but the politicians who are making policy based around what they say. These protests and riots were being encouraged by politicians who had been banning outdoor gatherings just two months prior.
>is a Republican appointed by Trump
I don't know if you're under the impression that I would grant more credence to somebody on this basis but my criticism isn't based around a fundamental opposition to wokies. It should not come as a surprise that people fall into science denialism and conspiracy theories when rules can change based around who stands to benefit from them. It was blatantly obvious that in certain locations lockdown rules were being tuned for political benefit.
If they truly thought outdoor gatherings were safe they could have said so at the beginning and it would have prevented a lot of opposition, especially from the religious groups who had a very legitimate constitutional argument in light of the fact that they weren't being allowed to gather indoors or outdoors.
>16 days after the protests started
that is exactly what I am talking about. Those protests lasted all summer, I don't know why you think a two-week delay between when they begin and when the rules are modified to the benefit of the protestors would absolve them of anything.
Here's an example of what you are claiming. A chemist publicly states his opinion on the current illegal immigrant crackdown and implies or directly states that his opinion has more value because he is a chemist.
Alternative example the chemist is interviewed for his opinion on immigration by the news (except as a bystander when they want random people to chime in).
For example CNN is discussing Trump's crackdown and says "here to talk about what Trump is doing is Harvard professor of Chemistry and (other titles) Chemist John Bismuth"
-----------
Can you provide an example of this?
Yep, there it is. You’re just upset that they don’t have your opinions.
When did this happen?
[0] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/04/public-hea...
That’s… not what they said? They said it was probably relatively safe to attend a protest because it was happening outdoors and Covid spread mostly through accumulated aerosols. It turned out to be good guidance: practically no one gets Covid that way unless a sick person is actively coughing on them.
No more athletes, musicians, artists, whatever. Everyone must be anonymous. Or is it strictly scientists who are not allowed to post if their profession is known?
Google+ had it right where you can follow just a community, and also you can selectively make your participation in certain communities visible in your public profile. I am not sure if Bluesky or Mastodon have something similar.
"Scientists say..." is becoming just another "studies show...". You can always find a scientist or a study or an "expert" to push whatever agenda the media outlet has.
Nothing about this is remotely scientific.
Literally true, perhaps. But have you ever noticed how reluctant non-scientist professionals are to voice opinions in their chosen fields? Lawyers preface everything with "not your lawyer", "not my area of practice...", "I'd have to look into the details of that case...", etc. Accountants similarly. Doctors similarly. Engineers similarly. Vs. it seems to be accepted practice for a nuclear physicist to speak ex cathedra about epidemiology, climatology, etc.
What is a scientist to do when they discover a vaccine or cure for something; say fuck it who cares if we change behavior? Are you saying a good vaccine advocate is someone who ignores the underlying science and acts dogmatically?
It just feels like you want to demonize this action of activism for… why? Just because there are lots of bad activists? There are a lot of bad scientists as well, to be honest the view of “good scientist” and “bad activist” feels dogmatic.
To answer your second point, science has a process for disseminating new findings. It's not perfect, but it works. Organizations that scientists work for do pay attention to those sources, discoveries do get patented and productionized. I encourage you to conduct some research: See how many people were talking about mRNA vaccines and gain-of-function research on social media before COVID vs after. The lack of social media coverage didn't affect the science or the scientists, who had spent the past decade conducting research on the subject.
I will maintain that Twitter/X/Bluesky are not part of the scientific process, nor should they be. These platforms do not encourage objective thought or reasoned arguments.
And then that’s just to get money in your specific direction, getting money in your general direction requires more broad activism.
It would be a sampling bias fallacy to draw conclusions based on your lack of observations.
Eg: "mountains, never seen them, they don't exist."
It is funny then for a geologist to be considered an activist when they say the mountains most certainly do exist.
Your first paragraph is unfounded. (Fwiw, The other two I found interesting. )
Right now I feel like there are a scientists who would hide or discard results if they contradicted their advocacy beliefs,which is a dangerous place to be imo.
It enacts no rules, laws, or regulations. That's done by policy makers who can listen to or ignore the guidance and data from the CDC at their discretion.
Why? Which of these other jobs would you call "Activism" an essential part of:
- Fire fighter
- Elementary school teacher
- Auto mechanic
- ER nurse
- Professor of Medieval History
- School shootings
- Sure, they can shut up
- COVID
- Is this one serious?
Are you calling it "Activism" when someone shares the opinion of 99.9% of the population, and spends 0 time advocating for that opinion?
Professor of Medieval history: Lots of political discourse makes claims about history or things like "the dark ages" that turn out to be mis-interpretations or false. Note that I have a friend in that field who often writes gentle corrections to false historical claims in online discourse.
How so? It seems obvious that you can do science (that is: attempt to advance the understanding of how the natural world works) without being an activist for any cause.
But I think what the GP means is let's do science, let's not do hot-political-topics-as-science.
If you’re not actually involved in science you only see the scientists making news, which disproportionately selects for politically intersecting areas of research.
When I was working at a major US research university in the early 2000s, it was a big deal if the scientific publications got any mainstream press at all.
Countless papers push the boundaries of science in major journals and conferences every year and you never hear about them because they have no political implications and usually no immediate practical applications.
That's true, but the other professions don't tend to be associated with (or clearly vindicate) the “above-the-crowd/holier-than-thou” attitude – and I say that as an ex-scientist, for the same reason (among others) as the poster above.
“Sure all the research shows X, but you can also believe y or even z because nothing really matters”
that's always been a fun conversation
Scientists should embrace decentralization and use Mastodon in my opinion. Bluesky will meet the same fate as Twitter and X one day
Have you seen the state of scientific "computing".
Science, and facts themselves, are political now.
Asking them to “not be activists” is really a request for them to self police their speech in a way that fits their worldview.
This is not restricted to scientists by the way. Just look at the different response to how the NFL handled Charlie Kirk’s death with official moments of silence vs. Colin Kaepernick kneeing for police brutality. One is supported, one is suppressed.
I’m fine seeing scientists arguing for the importance of science on social media. I don’t want to hear rants about LGBTQ+ people from geologists.
Build the filter bubble you want, not the one you've got.
You're not interested in science but kowtowing to perceived authority
Authors can still get reputation, recognition, and compensation for their papers, without people knowing who wrote what paper, via public/private keys and blockchain. Every time an author publishes a paper, they generate a new address and attach the public key to it. Judges send awards (NFTs) and compensation to the key without knowing who holds it, and if the same award type is given to multiple papers, authors can display it without anyone knowing which paper is theirs.
With LLMs even writing style can be erased (and as a side effect, the paper can be written in different formats for different audiences). Judges can use objective criteria so they can't be bribed without others noticing; in cases where the paper is an algorithm and the criteria is a formal proof, the "judge" can be a smart contract (in practice I think that would be a small minority of papers, but it would still be hard for a judge to nominate an undeserving paper while avoiding skeptics, because a deserving paper would match the not-fully-objective criteria according to a wide audience). Any other potential flaws?
2. Labs are specialized. You choose a lab to work at based on what they're working on. How are you going to choose where to spend your Ph.D or postdoc if you don't know what the lab is working on and how productive it is?
3. We are all still humans. We are wired to know the social systems around us. This would be an entire charade.
It doesn't solve all the issues, but it at least allows scientists to be "activists" (really just share their opinions like any other human) without affecting their credibility. Even if they're doxxed, they can eventually regain anonymity, because eventually other scientists with different views will publish papers on the same subject, and people can only distinguish who published what by its content.
Right now, scientists can share their opinions anonymously. This works well enough, except they can't share them in-person except to others they trust; and if they get doxxed, they can't remove their old posts from the name on their papers.
Bluesky is just the ideological opposite of whatever X is today, but with more blocking and censorship than even what Twitter had under Dorsey.
Or, do you some sort of systematic evidence that evaluates the politics across all of bluesky in comparison to X? I don't think there is such evidence to know that bluesy is the polar opposite of Twitter.
If you express an opinion, you’ll be blocked, and Bluesky has layers of blocking, and they love it.
So you've found a way to say "My job isn't at risk from a vindictive POTUS" in 14 words instead of 9. Great.