Shout out to the pro-science folks here and on twitter who admonished me for leaving and told me (1) I was letting down the cause and (2) by leaving I was playing politics instead of doing science.
No. A bully runs that house, and I'm walking out the door. You have no right to tell anyone to stay with an abuser and put up with threats to their own safety.
Unless you've weathered three years of death threats for your public health advocacy, keep it to yourself.
@ct_bergstrom walking away is actually the power move.
There is no fighting the good fight over something that someone else owns with complete control.
Real power in the town square is telling your friends and everyone who listens to walk a few blocks over and that is the new town square.
Twitter is only significant because of who uses it.
Remove its significance by walking away.
Staying is actually paying a billionaire to be a RW troll. He looooooves it.
Exactly. The presence of legit scientists, physicians, historians, etc. legitimizes the site. We add value through both posts and reputation.
It's time to withhold that value, in my opinion.
This is an excellent point that I had not previously considered. Thoughts, @richardsever ?
@[email protected] setting up the accounts that make every preprint a bot might be a challenge though (if I interpret you correctly). my hope is one can create a #tinyDOI for each article
@merz @ct_bergstrom @Brightdave
I don't disagree with this but torn on how much I should do to generally recreate my feeds. Derek Lowe left birdsite for exactly the reasons listed above, however he has moved to Post (and I can read whatever is posted there fine, so that's not a huge deal) which proliferates the URLs I need to manually open to check stuff.
I'm happy enough leavers decided on Mastodon for now, but many are cautious.
@StommePoes @ct_bergstrom @Brightdave
I mean, I don't pretend that the alternatives to Twitter are great in the sense that they have Old Twitter's maturity as a platform. But Old Twitter is gone, drowned by a sociopath.
@ct_bergstrom you have, multiple times in different ways, which is why I follow you.
I'm a molecular biologist and think about systems in different ways all the time. You, and others like you, are great drivers of how we change information dissemination and public discourse around science. Keep being awesome!
@jpanzer @ct_bergstrom perfect! The most succinct summation of this entire chaotic mess.
In a digital world, or words are the power, the town square. Write them elsewhere and the town square is moved.
And if some tech billionaire loses $44 B in the process, 🤷
@jpanzer @ct_bergstrom *where words are power...*
Damn it! That was a bad typo. Sorry.
Responding because we've had good conversations in the past and I have appreciated your voice.
This reminds me of the person on here who chided me for blocking nazis instead of trying to change their minds with loving engagement.
Sorry, I'm not superhuman.
That's futile and no one has the right to tell me whether I should remain in a situation where I feel profoundly unsafe.
I've paid my dues but even if I hadn't I'd still have the right to say that.
@Brightdave @ct_bergstrom You wouldn't publish research in a journal whose lead was actively encouraging people to join QAnon, right?
I'm surprised more people haven't left, after he did that the other day.
Carl T. Bergstrom
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Dave
Alexey Merz
JayMoore
Richard Sever
Lili
Compton Scatterbrained
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ZZ Bottom
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noa-witheringly
Elaine J
Condalmo.
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