It's more politicized..now?
More politicized than when literal politicians and three letter agencies were determining what should and shouldn't trend? How can anyone say that?
I do wonder if these clowns appreciate the long-term consequences of shattering the mystique of business executives. It's all memey fun and games in the moment, but later on when you have to make the counterargument against "why do these people deserve their billions? why shouldn't they all go up against the wall instead?" and you try to say "Well, it's because they're so talented and brilliant; doing so would cause incredible harm to the economy without their strong guidance", it becomes much harder to do that convincingly when we can all see them behaving like toddlers in public.
It's interesting to draw comparisons between Sam Altman and Liang Wenfeng, CEO of Deepseek, the latter of which is a domain expert, the former an exalted entrepreneur, supposedly gifted in allocating capital. If Sam has just been lucky with his one bet so far, there's bound to be some market corrections that are going to shake the world just like in the dotcom burst.
I'm sure that's never crossed Putin's mind...
Basically, if you buy the verified badge, you get promoted on the algo timeline, comments, everything. And people also getting money by views...
This affects in two ways, first, not a lot of people want to give Money to elon, and the elon fans want to pay.
Second, this also makes a lot of people posting everywhere posting insane things just to get views and money.
Oh, there's also the bots that just reposts other people tweets now on the comments.
Why comments? It's how you get more views (money).
Yes, I read this week in Private Eye that two of our frothiest UK MPs (Farage, Lowe) are earning £3k a month from tweets, mostly sycophantic praising of Trump and derision of immigrants as vermin. Top tier content, I'm sure you'll agree.
The whole thing with 'verification' and those posts being prioritised flipped that on its head, to the point where I couldn't stand using it any-more (this was two years ago).
Yes I know I can mute. But the settings can get reset and this has happened several times.
I did delete X this week though because there's been very little there I care about for quite some time that isn't also on Bluesky.
But unfortunately I'm not aware of a better way to be in the academic/research community. Twitter and BlueSky are where the conversations are happening. These do more for paper discovery than things like Google Scholar, Semanitic Scholar, and elsewhere. Not to mention that posts tend to have additional context that is often left out of works, making it easier to bridge into topics that are not in my niche.
The other unfortunate part, is that I too have to advertise my own work and myself to the community. The work is not enough. There's an easy to observe strong correlation between the number of citations I get and the amount of publicity my works get, with the latter strongly influenced by the efforts of myself and others in the research team. Though recognizing this, it does enable me to find a lot of hidden gems. Works that are often rejected and unnoticed because they are not from big research teams.
So far the pros outweigh the cons, well... at least for BlueSky. I can't say the same about Twitter and I'd wish more people would move over. Smaller communities have a lot of advantages.
Where the adults at?
