What I’ve liked most about Twitter is that it’s helped me to feel less isolated, as I’ve been able to connect with distant folks who share my interests and values, particularly regarding open science and reproducible research.
But somehow, lately, Twitter had me feeling less rather than more connected. I think maybe it’s been that conference effect: scientific conferences are great for catching up with old friends and seeing all of the cool things that everyone’s doing, but ultimately they often leave me feeling like crap because everyone else seems to be doing cool and exciting stuff while I gave a talk on the same old stuff I’ve been working on for five years with little apparent progress.
So I took a two-month break from Twitter. But I can’t say that I really felt better for it. And going back I see I’ve missed like 100 tweets about my paper with Kara Woo on data organization in spreadsheets. And I was mentioned among UW-Madison’s most interesting Twitter accounts.
So I’m coming back to Twitter, but maybe in a more scaled-back way.