Elon Musk bought Twitter almost a month ago.
The community I follow was speculating, half-seriously, that Musk has abruptly fired so many employees that the entire site would just crash.
My prediction is that many economists will stay on Twitter because it is such a useful venue for sharing work and ideas. There was also a sizable migration to Mastodon this week where a critical mass of economists will likely remain for a while. I made an account there @JoyBuchanan@econtwitter.net I don’t think my habits are going to change much right now, meaning I will not add being active on Mastodon to my current slate of activities. Personally, I find Facebook to be a place for meaningful connection in my professional community, as well, but that might be much harder for younger researchers to break into.
Here’s my “What if it all goes down?” moment. I’ll document a great tweet thread by Dennie van Dolder, who is an inspiration for the art form of announcing a working paper on Twitter. (Mastodon does not currently have the thread format, which might point people back to blogging on the margin?)
Dennie van Dolder of the University of Essex provides a tweet thread
I’ll screenshot that thread (just in case).
He also provides a blog post with high production quality and the more traditional SSRN working paper. It’s 2022 and that’s the trifecta for putting work out online, or at least it was. I have a “News” and a “History” category for classifying these blog posts. Where does this post belong? I settled on “Technology”.
Economist Writing Every Day 