Post 6: The importance of Twitter in science 🐦

This was the first time that I saw a paper where the Twitter profiles of the authors appeared as a contact. One of the best things I did was to open an “academic” profile on Twitter. I highly recommend it because it allows you to stay up-to-date with what’s happening in your research area every week, in addition to finding a lot of feedback in the comments of other scientists, as well as super useful links and even teaching materials!

Although I recommend keeping it academic and not getting distracted, as the algorithm will recommend you similar things, although it will always recommend some trash. The idea is to follow the profiles of other students or researchers/labs whose work is of interest.

Twitter has been so useful in academia that there is an article to introduce it.

• Ten simple rules for getting started on Twitter as a scientist

And its 10 tips are:

Rule 1: Start somewhere, but show up. Rule 2: Discover opportunities in academia. Rule 3: Tweet things. Rule 4: Learn the rules. Rule 5: Take care of yourself. Rule 6: Build your own community. Rule 7: Interface with real life. Rule 8: Spread your message. Rule 9: Be a real person. Rule 10: Great power and great responsibility.

By the other hand, Elon Musk represents many bad things in this world (and also good ones, because in the social dimension everything is subjective and on a scale of grays), however, having promoted the release of Twitter’s recommendation algorithm is something that frankly surprises me.

The part about detecting clusters/communities of profiles/topics is very interesting because it implies that indeed, there is a scientific Twitter, a FIFA one, a K-pop one, etc., etc. With Minecraft, many people have created new games, with Stable Diffusion people have extended their capabilities… what will happen with Twitter now that this code is free?

• Here more info