Ressentiment and hurt feelings over lose of prestige has hit many academic scientists hard. The ebbing away of respect and deference was not something they prepared for. They were taught, all through life, that these things would be theirs in abundance, got free by flashing their degree. Only now there is often laughter instead of applause.
They should have seen it coming. Decades of predicting every single thing, with no exceptions, would worsen because of “climate change”, the idea that treating delusions by making all agree with the delusions, and by chemically and surgically altering the delusional, the hersterical overblown false cries of “Follow the Science!’ in the covid panic, and the endless stream of nonsense of every stripe passed off in the name of science, all of which were funded by you, has whittled down to next to nothing the goodwill scientists earned over the years by inventing such modern miracles as chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and multiverses.
That’s my little joke. But it’s clear many scientists are running away from criticism, which is hurtful. Few enjoy being questioned, and almost none take well the abuse hurled on social media. Scientists want a return of the reflexive polite submissiveness (“Back off, man, I’m a scientist”), and many are coming to realize they aren’t going to get it. Not online, anyway.
Which is a long-winded introduction to the peer-reviewed paper—whose existence proves our thesis—“Scientists no Longer Find Twitter Professionally Useful, and have Switched to Bluesky” by DS Shiffman and J Wester in Integrative and Comparative Biology, a journal whose name would have you guess is about integrative and comparative biology, and not tittle tattle gathered, in the manner of cheap journalism, using surveys answered by those who can’t find an excuse not to answer. But the name lies. For that is exactly what this paper is.
The Synopsis, with my emphasis:
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 reason this topic has not been “studied” is because, as is obvious, it is not worth studying. Asking why a handful of scientists (willing to answer) which social media platform they prefer barely counts as news. What is interesting, though, is that academic scientists have joined the Cult of the Victim.
All know that there is no higher being than Victim. You are nobody in our culture unless you are an Official Victim, celebrity or multibillionaire. The last two heights are hard to attain, but anybody can be a Victim and be accorded respect and prestige. Scientists used to get this through their work, but now can’t—and for the same reason. Because of their work.
This is proved by the authors’ admission that moving to a platform, which by general acclaim is far left, they “gain” the “benefit” of praise and accolades missing from Twitter. They are right there have been changes at that platform, now called “X” (which I agree with the authors is an asinine name). During the covid panic, for instance, when The Science reigned supreme, I took to auto-deleting tweets after a week, because I was put in Twitter jail so often for criticizing The Science.
This is the world the authors would see restored. Where their word remains unquestioned by plebeians.
We know this, too, from one of the author’s own website (Shiffman; in which we learn their paper was presented at the “2025 Joint Meeting of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists”; are fish and snakes a metaphor here?).
Shiffman says Twitter now “encourages pseudoscience, conspiracy theory, an extremist political fringe, and harassment of experts (especially experts who are not white Christian men).”
And there it is. White Christian men, tacitly sexually normal, are by definition Official Oppressors, and can never be Victims. Shiffman can, and rejoices in it. He tells us his engagement “decreased by 99% eventually”, which is well into Victim territory. But what about other Bluesky refugees?
I will note that a few colleagues have reported that their engagement has remained the same or even increased slightly, but at least some of these colleagues do not use a data-based analytics strategy-it’s clear that even if these declines aren’t universal, they are widespread and common.
If they had used a data-based analytics strategy they would have discovered their increase was not an increase, maybe?
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