Academic Paper: Why Academics Are Leaving Twitter for Bluesky
AI summary of the linked articleResearchers Dorian Quelle, Frederic Denker, Prashant Garg and Alexandre Bovet report that scholar migration from Twitter/X to Bluesky is driven by peer influence, with simple rather than complex contagion. They linked 276,431 scholars on Twitter/X to their new profiles among 16.7 million Bluesky accounts, tracked from January 2023 to December 2024. Using Brazil's court-ordered suspension of Twitter/X as exogenous variation, they find treatment effects are short-lived and dose-dependent. Adoption concentrates among users deeply embedded in Twitter's social graph, public political expression predicts migration, and early reconnection with prior contacts predicts longer tenure on Bluesky. |
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2 comments  I asked o3 to summarize the paper: * Tracked about 276 000 academics from 2023-2025. * Roughly 1 in 5 opened a Bluesky account and stopped tweeting; split by field: ~31 % in arts & humanities vs ~13 % in medicine. * Biggest predictor is whether the accounts you read migrate. If 10 % of your followees leave, your own chance of quitting jumps about ten-fold compared with losing the same share of followers. * Five flashpoints caused most exits: 1. July 2023 global X outage 2. July 2023 “rate-limit” fee talk 3. Feb 2024 Bluesky public launch 4. Aug 2024 one-day X block in Brazil 5. Post-election rush after the Nov 2024 US vote * Re-creating your old Twitter reading list on Bluesky makes you stay active; failing to do so means you often drift away. * Political tweeters leave in a steady trickle; non-political scholars mainly bolt during the big shocks. * Citation counts, h-index, and “top-100 author” status have no effect on who quits. TL;DR: Academics move when the voices they rely on disappear—especially during Twitter/X hiccups—and they stick with Bluesky only if they can rebuild that feed.  Is there an academic vibe there, where people are talking about their research etc? That sounds like something I would check out. If its just academics spouting of politics, it sounds like the worst network in the world. |