At the end of 2022, we all thought Twitter (now called X) was about to break. In my broader twitter network of mostly academia and ecology/enviro interested folks, I started losing connections by the day as many people deleted or walked away from their accounts and started up somewhere else. I hung on because I’m an optimist and it had been such a positive experience for me, so I hoped the storm of new ownership would blow over.
I signed up to Mastodon just in case, but after a few weeks it wasn’t really replicating my Twitter experience at the time and I stayed on at Twitter/X hoping things would improve. I also signed up at LinkedIn and tried out Reddit, but neither filled the twitter-shaped hole.
I eventually made it to Bluesky and I love it….but it feels a bit like it’s starting to lag. I’ve reconnected with a lot of my previous network and found lots of great new accounts there. But the original networks have already fragmented and rewired. While a lot of people left X, many seem to have moved to different spaces, or left social media completely. For those that have stayed on at X, the algorithms have changed and I’m not connected to the same content I used to be. Bluesky is a lot quieter, and I find that the lack of algorithms also disconnect me from a lot of content I would have seen on X. So I’m still riding out the storm on both platforms, with an occasional dabble on LinkedIn, and we’ll see what the future holds.
As a side effect, I have found that the Twitter/X exodus has had an impact on my blog. When so many academics said they were leaving the twittersphere (with many saying they were leaving social media altogether) I thought that this might be a chance for the blogosphere to reignite!
Blogs apparently died a few times over the last few years, because supposedly no one was reading them anymore. A group of us ecology bloggers even wrote a paper back in 2017 arguing for the merits and benefits of blogs for academic community building. I wondered if the decline of X would drive more academics back to engaging with each other on the blog circuit. A few ecology bloggers have already announced their return, including Dynamic Ecology and Jabberwocky Ecology.
But social media platforms are integral to blog success because sharing of posts is a huge contribution to readership. Most readers engage with individual posts, rather than being loyal readers of every blog entry, and they are more likely to find those posts via social media shares instead of subscribing to lots of blog sites. My blog readership increased after I joined Twitter in 2014 and started sharing my posts there. According to my blog stats, Twitter/X has hosted the highest total shares of my blog posts (6100+) with Facebook coming in second at about 5700.
So it’s unsurprising that my readership appears to decline rapidly in 2023 after the year that Twitter broke. At first I thought it might be because I have been posting less frequently after having a baby at the end of 2021, but even after calculating the number of views per number of published posts for each year, the decline trend appears.
Readership trend for Ecology Is Not A Dirty Word
Of course, decline trends are notoriously difficult to confirm, so this is simply a potential correlation that could be interesting to look further into. I now share my new posts on X, Bluesky and LinkedIn and definitely get more engagement on Bluesky, although nowhere near as much as I used to see on Twitter/X.
We’re in a period of disruption for academic and science communication. Social media networks are rewiring, misinformation is rapidly becoming one of the biggest global risks, academia is facing some hard questions about its future… So I’m looking forward to seeing how academic blogs contribute to this new era.
© Manu Saunders 2024