Overthinking

Overthinking

I used to be a pathological overthinker. Everything had to be carefully planned, from the words I would say to the baker to order a baguette to all the insignificant details of any of the projects I worked on. Is it better to tweet at 18:00 or 18:05? Rust or

How tweet threads cured my writer's block: Twitter as a medium for sketching

Twitter is a powerful <b>medium for sketching</b>: a tool for fluidly developing ideas in realtime. What can we learn from its design? I think it shows us the power of 1) the right constraints, 2) low barriers to starting and finishing, and 3) a social context.

A Tweet Before Dying

The revolutionary internet is over, and we don’t have much to show for it. A new start is out there, somewhere.

Firehose 451Hz - tweets per second

Lead them to paradise.

Scientists no Longer Find Twitter Professionally Useful, and have Switched to Bluesky

Synopsis. Social media has become widely used by the scientific community for a variety of professional uses, including networking and public outreach. For

Scientists no Longer Find Twitter Professionally Useful, and have Switched to Bluesky

Synopsis. Social media has become widely used by the scientific community for a variety of professional uses, including networking and public outreach. For

Scientists no Longer Find Twitter Professionally Useful, and have Switched to Bluesky

Synopsis Social media has become widely used by the scientific community for a variety of professional uses, including networking and public outreach. For the past decade, Twitter has been a primary home of scientists on social media. In recent years, new leadership at Twitter has made substantive changes that have resulted in increases in the prevalence of pseudoscience, conspiracy theory, and harassment on the platform, causing many scientists to seek alternatives. Bluesky has been suggested as a good alternative to Twitter, but the phenomenon of academics switching social media platforms has not previously been studied. Here we report on the results of a survey distributed to scientists on Twitter and Bluesky (n = 813). Results overwhelmingly confirm that changes to Twitter have made the social media platform no longer professionally useful or pleasant, and that many scientists have abandoned it in favor of Bluesky. Results show that for every reported professional benefit that scientists once gained from Twitter, scientists can now gain that benefit more effectively on Bluesky than on Twitter.

The Future of Twitter: Q&A with Jack Dorsey

An in-depth conversation on 10 years of tweeting, the importance of live media, and “the puddle.”

How we built Twitter Lite

Stop Begging Big Tech To Fix Your Social Media Experience. You Can Do It Yourself.

Disclaimer: This post talks about Bluesky and an offering from Bluesky and I am on the Bluesky board. Take everything I say with whatever size grains of salt you feel is appropriate. I’ve wri…

A quick and dirty guide to making custom feeds on Bluesky

So, you’ve made it! The remnants of science twitter have at last begun to coalesce around a new microblogging platformed owned by questionable individuals with inadequate content moderation t…

Twitter Thoughts For You

I previously have written back in March 2022 about how I use Twitter, and back in April 2023 about Twitter and its then-new algorithms, which have changed again.