You may have noticed that our blog output here has gone up quite a bit. With the current plan we’re moving from five posts at most in a week to at least fifteen a week with the new system. It’s the result of me being fed up with two different problems.
First up, we’ve been busy posting to social media. Since the improvements at Twitter, it’s become a lot harder to track what’s popular on social media. So we’ve developed a new system that requires around twelve posts a day. This is a lot of work, and none of it was appearing on the weblog.
At the same time, I wasn’t happy with all of these posts. You tend to have a short space in which to talk about the paper. This is even shorter when you include the title, a link and a signifier to say whether is it’s a subscription paper ($) or free to read through Open Access (OA). Usually, the pithiest description is by the authors in the abstract, but that doesn’t always get to what is eye-catching about the paper.
Our social media scheduler, Buffer, is making some changes allowing us to post threads of messages in a schedule to Bluesky, Threads and, soon I hope, Mastodon. That allows us to write short, 200-300 word threads about a paper directly to social media. The length also allows us to post something to the weblog too.
It still requires posting at scale. That’s why if you were to read all the posts you’d notice they’re a little formulaic. Here’s the formula:
- A short one-sentence summary of the most important message of the article.
- An introduction that aims to mention what was studied, the name of the authors who studied it, what they found and why that might be important.
- A paragraph about the most important finding in the paper.
- A paragraph about how they found out what they did
- A paragraph about how the research relates to previous work on the subject, or maybe a quote from the paper.
- Final paragraph of a citation for the paper.
I don’t always stick to the formula, but having this framework reduces the cognitive load when skim-reading multiple papers a day and picking three to post.
You’ll see a lot of that information should be in the abstract, so it should be possible to thread post all six papers that we mention a day. That is emphatically not going to happen. Mechanically, formatting the posts takes time. Also, the papers I post about also get more of a read than just the abstract. Doing this for six papers a day might be possible on a very good day, but leaves no space for average or bad days. It may yet be that the number of papers getting In Brief posts drops to two or one.
As with other things, we’ll keep measuring this to see if it’s an effective use of time. That means if you ignore them, they should go away.
You’ll notice that Twitter doesn’t get a mention for these threads. We could post these thread messages directly as just one post to Twitter if we bought a subscription. A few weeks ago I was in a meeting in my car via speakerphone, because I unexpectedly had to make sure people got back from work safely. At the same time, Musk was making the race riot situation worse. Paying someone to help them make my life a little more difficult doesn’t seem the best idea.
I realise there are people still on Twitter because that’s where their support network is. For now, there will be automated posts to Twitter pointing to the weblog, that also mention where we are on other social media sites. If we’re persuaded that Twitter is starting to take user safety seriously, then we’re open to changing our mind.
