Twitter is often extremely useful for scientific fields, and in many ways is perfect for it. You can post a figure and legend, tag people that may find it interesting, and start threaded discussions. It's all in the public, with no invitations or closed doors, so it is open to discovery by that dozen or two dozen people in the world that may be interested.

Science is the ultimate long-tail of super-specialized interests with extremely small audiences, and Twitter is perfect for connecting those people with extremely esoteric interests.

There is a lot of crap, but science Twitter is also the only reason I'm on it. Sadly, my own biases against Twitter Kept me off it for 8+ years, but after I started finding the right people to follow, a whole new world opened up, and it is now a vital tool for me to navigate the literature and learn quickly which new tools are best.

>There is a lot of crap, but science Twitter is also the only reason I'm on it. Sadly, my own biases against Twitter Kept me off it for 8+ years, but after I started finding the right people to follow, a whole new world opened up, and it is now a vital tool for me to navigate the literature and learn quickly which new tools are best.

That's really interesting, I've been avoiding Twitter for the same reason, but I can see how it'd help keep up with fast-moving niche fields. Maybe I'll give it a try, thanks!

How does it compare with following the same account on Facebook?

I don't know of anybody that uses Facebook for science discussion, but I did know many that were using Twitter for science, which is what finally drew me in.

Facebook seems like a much worse fit than even Twitter for discussion, but I would potentially check it out if somebody I trusted had found it useful.

There are plenty of blue checkmark specialists in these fields on Twitter who are ready to go to critique and contextualize their field. Of course the issue on Twitter is A) finding them B) filtering the low effort and bad faith trolling in the replies.

Other than twitter, I'm not sure where else you can find that audience that is accessible to a layman.

Slightly off topic but I once had a question at work on a very niche corporate finance topic. So I logged onto Twitter and tagged Aswath Damodaran in the question and had the world's foremost authority in Corporate Finance respond in like 30 minutes with a detailed answer. Twitter can be amazing for finding specialized expertise if you know where to look.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aswath_Damodaran

That is indeed the magic of Twitter. I’ve mostly avoided it since the last presidential election but prior to that my ability to connect with people doing interesting things all over the world was incredible.

Ok that’s very powerful. But yes, after 2016 I assume such places are a plaque themselves.

I don't know, I find pseudo-anonymized, but (mostly) civilized and on-point debate that touches varying spheres of sciences as well as degrees of accuracy on them, quite valuable, too. It could probably be more "valuable", if all posts were anonymized, but then it might entail all the dangers that 4chan reminiscences about.

Sometimes, reputation blocks science too, e.g. applied in reverse, the reputation-seeking prevents many false-hypothesis confirmations, because they're less likely to propel a career (or damage it).

EDIT: ...come to think of it, the scientific method is in itself reputation-agnostic.

EDIT2: ...imagine a world, where all science was public, open, but anonymized. No patents, no proprietary research. It's a dystopia for some, and possibly a utopia for others.