
Getting started on Twitter as a scientist - amrrs
https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007513
======
knzhou
As a scientist I have a strong aversion to getting on Twitter, and this
article isn't helping. All my experience with Twitter has told me it's a
concentrator for hot (i.e. wrong) takes, snarky dismissals, and sloganeering,
to a greater extent than any other social media platform. It seems to degrade
thoughtful people into ordinary ones and ordinary people into monsters. I'll
take even HN flamewars over that any day.

~~~
SkyMarshal
_> It seems to degrade thoughtful people into ordinary ones and ordinary
people into monsters._

In my experience that’s about 90% true, but there’s a small minority of people
who remain thoughtful and insightful even in 280 characters. If you can find
them and mutually follow each other, and then mute or block all the blowhards,
tryhards and self-promoters, you’ll have cultivated a useful network of
colleagues beyond what you might otherwise have via work and conferences.

And if multi-disciplinary perspectives are valuable to your own research, then
that Twitter network is especially valuable in that regard, as it’s likely to
be at least as multidisplinary as your day-to-day work environment and more-so
than your usual conference circuit.

That said, it does take some work to cultivate that graph. May or may not be
worth the time and opportunity cost.

~~~
abnry
I tried blocking the blowhards, but it didn't work. Problem was retweets and
the 10% of the time someone sane decided to tweet something insane. Hard to
counter that. My feed was just too leaky. So I quit. Things seemed to change
around 2016...

~~~
SyneRyder
You can turn off retweets on a per-user basis, if someone is prone to
retweeting nonsense. My answer to the 10% insanity has been to ruthlessly
unfollow.

Using the Twitter website is still madness, though. The only way I can survive
Twitter is with an app like Tweetbot or Fenix, that doesn't show what other
users Like & keeps everything chronological. They're still around from the
days when Twitter was designed to be used by third-party client apps, ala IRC.

~~~
SkyMarshal
*>My answer to the 10% insanity has been to ruthlessly unfollow.

Second this, absolutely necessary. You don't need many connections to make it
worthwhile, just ones you wouldn't otherwise connect with in some other way
besides Twitter.

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Traster
One thing that this article misses about twitter is that you carry your
followers around with you. So if you have 1000 followers and you tweet at
someone, whatever you're saying, you're saying in front of 1000 of your fans.
So if you disagree with someone not only are they going to get your criticism,
they're likely to get 1000 people piling on behind you. There are lots of
things I can say to you one on one that are suddenly basically bullying if
I've got a mob behind me.

Equally, if you draw attention to someone, even if you aren't disagreeing with
them, you have to be aware that you're likely subjecting them to a level of
unwanted attention from your audience.

~~~
bosswipe
If you reply to someone's tweet then mostly the people who follow both
accounts will see the reply, in addition Twitter's algorithms will opaquely
decide whether to show the reply to your other followers. If you want to
ensure that your followers see the reply you can use Retweet with Comment.

------
azangru
> There is no single guideline on when to block somebody—some may only support
> blocking trolls, and refrain from blocking other scientists who may be
> critical, while others believe it’s perfectly fine to mute or block any
> account... A good rule of thumb might be to block somebody if they have a
> repeated negative effect on your Twitter experience

> It is perfectly okay to not look at Twitter for hours or even days.

> Do not worry that this might be confusing: Twitter users can easily skip
> over tweets in languages they are not proficient in...

Who is the target audience of a text like this? Do people feel they need
someone's permission to block someone, or to skip Twitter for a while, or to
write in whichever language they please? Honestly!

~~~
thrwaway69
The point is to commoditize yourself so that's not unexpected. The brand (you)
has to get good at targeting the audience they are selling product (yourself)
to and avoid interacting with the competition or getting run over by trolls.

Protecting the brand (yourself) is important.

To distinguish the brand (yourself) from others, the brand (you) has to set
something people can look up to as a way to differentiate their experience
with them (you).

What the brand (you) likes, follows, engages with etc defines the image of
them (you) and the right market fit (their feed).

Accessibility is a huge factor for a commodity (sellable parts of you as a
whole) whilst some blocking may be necessary for setting the cultural
expectations for the brand (you).

If the brand (you) block people from certain group and it is public, that
might work as a signal for what the brand (you) stands for.

Let's suppose the brand (I) blocks a mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, then that
works as a signal for that the brand (I) cares about privacy and against
people who exploit that.

If the brand (I) only uses English to tweet, then that might be a signal for
which audience product (I) is made for.

If the brands (yours) block list isn't diverse, it might signal as a
racial/ethnic/gender/sex bias.

------
jeffadotio
One becomes so caught up in the fear of becoming obsolete and the dopamine-
fueled satisfaction of staring into a screen that we fail to make simple
evaluations that are right in front of us. Is a thumbs up emoji posted by
someone with whom you shook hands at a conference six months ago while he sits
on the toilet going to give you any real value or are you just succumbing to
social pressure?

In the thousands of hours that users sink into social media in a year one
could instead read, learn to code, learn an instrument or learn anything at
all. Who is more interesting, a biologist who plays the mandolin and is semi-
fluent in a second language or a biologist with lots of Twitter followers?

------
hirenj
Within my field, it looks like science twitter is useful, but only up to a
limit. The primary use derived from it is a list I found myself added to. It
actually contained people who were only peripherally related to the research I
do, but meant that there was great diversity in the papers that were promoted
in the feed - not all relevant, but at least interesting.

A second use is a signalling factor that you are active in the field - really
an exercise in building brand.

Finally, there are probably two people who actively engage in discussion on
Twitter (from my field). This doesn't happen more often because scientific
review is a subtle beast, and doing it in the open with 280 chars, as quickly
as possible on a phone isn't conducive to constructive feedback. In fact, I've
got a number of draft tweets initiating discussions that I didn't end up
sending because it just felt plain rude to review in that manner!

------
andreyk
I am a PhD student at Stanford (focusing on AI/learning algorithms for
robotics manipulation) and happened to retweet this article, so perhaps I can
give my perspective. This is what I tweeted about this:

"Neat discussion of benefits of this here platform for scientists /
researchers. Personally I was pretty mystified with its popularity til trying
it and finding it useful, so this might be helpful for like-minded ppl. But,
imo it's really mostly a great way to keep up w news.
[https://t.co/J3aLAh56W3"](https://t.co/J3aLAh56W3")

Really, don't knock it til you try it. As I said in a reply on here, the
biggest benefit is being able to keep up with neat new papers from researchers
you think do cool work. Just after that first tweet I just happened to see
this from a researcher at Google:

"New from Google Research! REALM:
[https://t.co/kS2oTyxAAj](https://t.co/kS2oTyxAAj) We pretrain an LM that
sparsely attends over all of Wikipedia as extra context. We backprop through a
latent retrieval step on 13M docs. Yields new SOTA results for open domain QA,
breaking 40 on NaturalQuestions-Open!
[https://t.co/DYDFX69Td8"](https://t.co/DYDFX69Td8")

And I retweeted it with a comment that it's cool (and read the paper to
understand a bit more) and now follow that researcher.

Like any big platform, Twitter can be used in bad ways (engaging in drama,
constantly looking at it instead of working _cough_ much like HN _cough_ ,
etc.), and it can be used in many good ways. I was pleasantly surprised with
how useful it actually is, personally.

That being said... much of the content of this article is kinda weird, it's
not like this is that complicated... I guess the intent is to speak to more
senior researchers, but it does come off weird.

~~~
jeffadotio
> it's really mostly a great way to keep up w news

Receiving information is not the same as being informed. The head of
Facebook’s news authority is the owner of a far-right news site. A famous 2012
study[1] found that Fox News viewers were the least informed on facts covered
by the news while NPR listeners were the most informed. Fox viewers were even
less informed than those who consumed no news media at all. All news is not
created equal and you are what you read. Curation is important and an
organization with a fact-oriented status quo is a superior source.

1\. [https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2012/survey-
nprs-l...](https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2012/survey-nprs-
listeners-best-informed-fox-news-viewers-worst-informed/)

~~~
andreyk
When I wrote news, I meant news for me as a researcher (which I figured can be
gleaned from context), ie new papers, conference announcements, etc. Not much
disinformation there...

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dekhn
Scientists should spend less time on twitter. It's all noise, and even the
signal gets distorted by all the crazies.

------
senderista
There's definitely a lot of good content one can find linked on Twitter (not
so much tweets themselves). But I ultimately decided it wasn't worth the
opportunity cost when I have a house full of books I could be reading instead.

------
xhkkffbf
When do we get to mob people we don't like? It's like covertly campaigning
against tenure but without being passive aggressive! I'm just here for the
ratio!

------
codekilla
Don’t

------
tsukurimashou
J. Peterson suspects the small character limit get people to react impulsively
and often aggressively.

~~~
aaron695
Twitter is a cesspool of shit. The worst of humanity.

But like any war zone if you're tough and willing to take a risk there's money
to be made.

But if you cry over getting rape and death threats or don't like people who
make them, then just don't go there. That is part of Twitter, it's in it's
fundamental design, you enter 7 billions peoples homes and ask what they think
of your opinion. It's not for the normal scientist, they can do great things
outside of Twitter.

To your point, yes the character limit seems likely it is a factor of why it's
so bad. But lot's more people than J. Peterson think that.

But he perhaps was one of the first to think fundamentally at a low
physiological level what was happening.

------
buboard
Please dont! Very very few scientists can use twitter for scientific
discussions, they are interesting, technically capable, and are already there.
Do not encourage scientists to slide down the road of self-promotion, as most
people on twitter do.

I hate how much time academic institutions and PIs are investing in social
media, curating facebook pages, twitter pages, a linked pages yadda yadda.
It's mostly scientists chasing publicity so they can add another
blog/newspaper article bullet to their CV so they can get more funding. I
sincerely hope funding bodies start banning those publicity bullet points from
CVs during evaluations.

~~~
Fomite
My field's Twitter hashtag is one of the best sources for interesting and
technically capable discussions. If I have a question, at this point I'll turn
to Twitter before I turn to say...the relevant Stack Exchange site.

Also, most major funding bodies (NSF, NIH, etc.) use standard "biosketch"
templates that are separate from CVs already and don't use that category.

