Brett, I'll admit I "called you out" (in a sense...I wasn't intending to be accusatory or inflammatory in the slightest) because I sensed you might respond here, hehe. But I'm glad you did, because you just posted some gold in here! I wish I could "pin" some of your responses quoted below to the top of this thread as a means of highlighting some of the best takeaways from this thread.
See, if you don't snark and smarm and virtue signal and spend a dozen hours per week trying to ingratiate yourself into the #wxtwitter social scene, then even your high-value posts are almost invisible. Meanwhile, the popular accounts can post questionable "analysis," and it rockets to the top of everyone's feed within minutes. Said "analysis" then strongly influences the hundreds or thousands of newer, younger, less educated #wxtwitter users... many of whom get the impression from SM that a few popular accounts are unimpeachable authorities on the current state of the science. And they get that impression in part because even a lot of the true experts tend to fawn over them, almost as if the aura of Twitter popularity is an aphrodisiac not even PhDs can overcome.
I have noticed this myself a lot. Twitter (and now that I'm on Bluesky, even there, too) tends to be full of posts by prominent accounts who
live on out-of-context zingers. Such an ethos probably led to the proliferation of "_No_Context_YadaYadaYada" accounts on Twitter (and starting to see it on X, too). Sometimes the accounts are pretty tame and not full of high-strung, topical content. But many are. And if you're not up-to-the-moment informed as to what has gone on in popular culture or politics, you'll often have no idea to what the post refers. It's really annoying to have to try to guess what people are getting at. But the snarkier, the more attention it will receive.
Also great point about the dogmatism that arises when certain accounts become popular. People equate popularity with authority for some reason, and the filtering begins (i.e., anytime the popular account actually posts something factually inaccurate or out-of-touch, the "stans" rush to defend it anyway by attempting to
force the inaccuracy to become the truth. That, or they tell anyone who calls it out a horrible name and to GTFO or otherwise flame them). So then even the true experts on a subject feel like they can't touch this popular account anymore.
I haven't noticed too many of the true experts fawning over popular accounts. Some here and there, but maybe that's because I make a conscious effort to keep my head down and resist getting pulled into the influence of those popular accounts. I started doing that in 2021.
To me, all this illustrates one of the most underrated dangers of modern SM: the ease with which the perception of credibility and knowledge in a particular field can be grossly distorted, usually by giving those outside a field the impression that expertise is highly concentrated in a few messiah-like figures who are good at gaming the algorithm and social dynamics. There are probably several hundred academics and research meteorologists in the U.S. whose careers have focused on severe convective storms. But for the vast majority of us, our content is overlooked when we do post, in part because the small handful of "social dynamics game winners" are sucking all the oxygen out of the room. It's not that I envy their online popularity; they can have that. It's just a shame that the serious side of SM is so tightly coupled to the parasocial, snark-driven side that tends to dominate most of people's attention spans.
Yes! OMG, Yes! And this represents such a discrepancy with the 1990s when the internet started gaining widespread usage and popularity. People called it the "information superhighway" because it opened up a wealth of knowledge to so many more people (rather than having to spend $1000 on a set of Encyclopedias or needing personal connections to experts, for example). With social media starting in the 2010s, the actual
mass of "information" (in the sense of organized bits of localized negative entropy that are hypothesized to be inexorably destroyed within a black hole) has continued to rise exponentially, but the utility or knowledge component of that information has tanked. So much of what people post on social media is almost immediately of no use to anyone and is not worthy of being stored.
sideways dystopian rant; feel free to skip said:
But of course, the social media companies discovered that credit card companies, shopping companies, and malicious actors will open their wallet to this trove of useless "information", and so they began constructing O($100 million) data centers to store all of that crap on servers that companies like OpenAI later came along to use to train the first generation of impressively-able generative AI systems. I still say that information is pretty useless to humans, but this is the way the world is going now.
Getting back to my point - there is a lot of mis- and dis-information in all that information content being tossed into the servers of these social media companies. So, unlike the 1990s, the firehose of information coming at us is tainted with incorrect, misleading, or even malicious information, rather than the more encyclopedic knowledge that I believe would truly lead to an improvement in our society overall (rather than just making certain companies absurdly wealthy). And the sciences (even the physical sciences) are caught well within that web of tainted information. It sucks. It really does.
