from Hacker News

The Vibes Are Off: Did Elon Musk Push Academics Off Twitter?

by jrajav on 10/21/24, 5:51 PM with 23 comments

  • by nameless912 on 10/21/24, 6:53 PM

    Anecdotally, the answer is a resounding yes. The two major academic communities I follow, mathematics and geology, have wholesale abandoned Twitter in the last several months for (mostly) Bluesky.

  • by erulabs on 10/21/24, 7:21 PM

    The net is bifurcating and, twitter vibes aside, I think we should all be a bit concerned with this “balkanization” of the internet. I don’t blame any one person, and it’s arguably better than everyone on one platform, still…

  • by pmyteh on 10/21/24, 9:25 PM

    At least in my experience it wasn't all due to Musk. My part of the academic world was quite small, and seemed to be increasingly uncomfortable with the enshittification of Twitter before Musk's purchase. Observing that the new owner was a shitlord probably coordinated a departure earlier than otherwise would have happened, but I think the process was well underway already.

    We mostly ended up on Mastodon, I think. Personally I'm quite grateful that it's no longer professionally necessary to have an extra social media account.

  • by mullingitover on 10/21/24, 11:06 PM

    Who, aside from the extreme right wing, Elon Musk stans, and grifters, has not been pushed off twitter in the past year (and especially the past couple months)?

    Admirable for someone to try to quantify this, though. The Brazil mass migration to Bluesky seems to have broken through another floor for twitter's userbase, we're likely atop another inflection point right now as basically everything Musk touches turns into MAGA hats.