Science social media is dead

Long live science social media?

For a long time, I refused to call it X. I’d joined it as Twitter, and had lots of useful and interesting interactions on Twitter. So I wasn’t going to succumb to a grumpy-teenager-going-through-a-phase vibed rebrand.

But increasingly, I found the positive use cases for Twitter were drowning in nonsense and hatred. The high profile reposts and algorithmic changes also suggested to me that this new atmosphere was very much the aim of the new owner. Then, a couple of months ago, I wrote a piece on online manipulation, and included a quote that I’d originally come across while researching The Rules of Contagion. It was a journalist who was aware that their pieces about extreme political groups were getting clicks and engagement, but at a cost:

“The people I’m covering are some of the worst people I’ve ever met, their attitudes are despicable, I feel like they’re getting less resistance from the culture and system and I feel like something really bad is coming down the line,” he said, before pausing. “It’s really good for me, but really bad for the country.”

I know it sounds a bit earnest, but whenever I looked at my 140,000-odd Twitter followers as a motivation for staying on the platform (which, as we shall see, was more illusory number than it seemed), I couldn’t stop thinking about that quote.

It’s really good for me, but really bad for the country.

And I realised it wasn’t Twitter I was using any more. The bird, to paraphrase the classic sketch, had ceased to be. It was an ex-Twitter. So X it would be, and elsewhere I would have to go.

Initially, it felt a bit like surrendering. I would be abandoning the communities that had grown on Twitter, and the networks I had worked to develop. Why let a new owner ruin all this? But I gradually realised that this framing implied Twitter itself was the community, rather than just a bit of tech that helped a network of people connect.

People and their interactions – not social media tech – are what really matter. In theory, the key parts of the online network could therefore migrate elsewhere. Remember how in the early 2000s, friendship groups would all be on the same mobile phone network to get cheaper calls and text messages? Then occasionally they would all switch when a much better deal came along? I wondered whether moving away from Twitter could end up a bit like this, just at scale. Quite inconvenient at first, but doable, and eventually a much better experience.

But if Twitter had disappeared, where else could these useful, interesting conversations about science, data, research, health, and policy happen?

I’ve enjoyed posting on Substack over the past 18 months, both as a way to share and refine my ideas, and hope you’ve found some of my posts interesting and useful too. But I think there’s still a need for something shorter and quicker, that makes it easy to engage with a wide and diverse group of people, whether students, researchers, journalists, politicians or entrepreneurs. And share animal GIFs, obviously.

Threads? Too Instagram-y and algorithmic. LinkedIn? Too serious. Mastodon? Too many barriers for a mass audience.

So I started using Bluesky more (I’m adamjkucharski.bsky.social). And I began noticing more and more engagement relative to X. I ran some mini experiments to see how much more. I was surprised to see that when I shared like-for-like posts about my new Substack pieces, they consistently got orders of magnitude more engagement per follower than the same posts on X/Twitter:

And in many cases there was similar if not more engagement in absolute terms too:

As well as the ‘why am I supporting this terrible platform?’ motivation, it meant there was also a purely pragmatic one. For me, at least, Bluesky is now a much better place to engage with the people who are interested in my work – and the sort of people whose work I’m interested in – than X is.

Maybe it will last and even get better; maybe it won’t. Based on the large influx of people I’ve noticed there in recent days, though, it seems I’m not the only one thinking this. And perhaps you are too.

If you are new to Bluesky and not sure where to start, there are lots of handy topic-specific ‘starter packs’ to find people to follow. Here’s a directory of all 5000+ of them, and here are a few I’ve found useful:

• Statistics people: http://go.bsky.app/7TBN5rX

• Data people: http://go.bsky.app/8TdEfdK

• Medical statistics people: http://go.bsky.app/ArqEz36

• Global health, infectious diseases & epidemiology people: https://bsky.app/starter-pack/scientificdiscovery.dev/3l3ti6mc6sy2u

• Stats and meta-science people: http://go.bsky.app/LqYZHBX

If there are other areas of research you would like to follow and want suggestions, feel free to tag me and I’ll repost. It won’t be shared to 140,000 people, I’m afraid, but at least you’re more likely to get some actual engagement.

Cover image: Vincenzo Di Giorgi via Unsplash

---

If you’re interested, here’s my piece from last year on the importance of Twitter for sharing COVID knowledge: