twitter and the enshittification of academic social media

 It's a year (more or less) since twitter was bought by Elon Musk and began its journey to becoming X.

I'm not going to comment on the changes, I jumped ship sometime ago, more because of the gradual change in content, than any inherent distaste for the new ownership.

Basically, what was happening was enshittification where the signal to noise ratio on a particular channel rises to a level to no longer make it useful. It's also why I don't do facebook, or insta, or anything else - too much crap.

Interestingly there's a post going around about how a large part of the academic community has stayed on twitter because of the community - essentially people are staying there because people are there, and none of the alternatives, for example Mastodon, have the critical mass of individuals to make it worthwhile posting.

Now I'm not an academic, or even a retired academic, but I have been a digital archiving specialist and more recently worked as volunteer on a project for the National Trust to document the contents of Dow's Pharmacy, and certainly twitter, with its large community, was tremendously useful when I had a something like a transcription problem on a handwritten label.

Equally, it let me stand on the sidelines and follow my lifelong interest in Roman history and archaeology.

Twitter was indeed valuable.

However, I don't miss it.

Using a RSS reader (I use inoreader) has allowed me to assemble a set of feeds that let me follow my interests in both Roman things and Victorian murders and pharmacology. Likewise mastodon gives me a platform where I follow enough people to get the happenstance effect - like ninety per cent of everything posted is crap irrelevant, but every so often there's something interesting or relevant.

However, what I do see is the fragmentation of communication, with material appearing on SubStack etc, as well as other social media platforms, leading to a loss of universality.

 For a long time twitter was the default because  it was the only game in town, and classic blogging platforms because they've been around for years and provided an established platform for longer more complex posts.

Now things are more fragmented, and that, potentially, is a problem ...