Hey thanks for explaining this. Twitter’s not something I ever warmed to and still look at people with confusion when they use it. Like artists, there is a crazy work pressure for academics to get noticed. To the point of cruelty sometimes. It makes sense that Twitter would work because, like you said, it works well-enough and has a low barrier to entry.

Yes that’s it. It feels sort of manipulative.

lol, no not like that. Extreme case, as in, when the modal value is a 4% uptake with an SD of 0.5, then picking something with a 73% uptake is an extreme case.

Yeah, I’ve learned so much from people on that place.

The thing that is killing reddit for me is its endless suggestion of communities that I may want to read. I use reddit to get away from having stuff shoved into my face. I want to explore and find things that are relevant to me or things that are unique and challenging, not have random nonsense shown to me as a way of increasing some silly engagement metric.

There is a very impressive set of reasons why we could and should encourage less CO2 intensive forms of transport, indeed many actions. However, these arguments always seem to me to take the pattern of picking the extreme example of whatever good we are hoping to achieve and then implying that everyone else could easily make the switch. There is always a wide and natural variety in things and this is true for differences between nations too. Extreme examples used like this often just end up making a bigger divide between people because the discussion misses all of the important differences that constrain choices and shape outcomes. We just end up talking from our own perspectives and experiences rather than exploring the complicated and difficult questions of how we can produce localised and regional responses to CO2 emissions drawn from fossil fuels.

I have former academic coworkers who use it to promote their publications etc. It’s an odd thing because their (very left) politics definitely don’t belong on twitter anymore. The only reason I can think of why they stay is because they are still convinced that one day they’ll become famous. Twitter really seems to play on the idea that everyone can be a superstar. Sad really.