Idle Words Thoughts on research, life, etc

I'm an NLP Researcher. I didn't check Twitter for a year. It was fine.

27 Mar 2024 • Emmy Liu

(Before anyone who knows me says “wait a minute, I’ve seen you post things on Twitter!”, I have occasionally posted and reposted papers for work reasons more or less, but for more or less a year, I haven’t opened Twitter to browse through new posts at all. This is what I mean by “I didn’t check Twitter for a year”.)

I am also not a Twitter personality or famous for my work, if I were, the tradeoffs would change a bit and I may not have ever made this post. I’m speaking as just an ordinary researcher who uses Twitter to post my work/friends’ works and to keep up with the literature, which I think describes a large segment of students and researchers. If you also fit in this demographic, the approach I outline may work for you.

TL;DR: Experiencing the typical mid-PhD ennui, I lose interest in keeping up with Twitter and stuff in general, and surprisingly I find that I don’t really miss it. Some more thoughts on a slower way to read literature and think of ideas.

The requisite existential crisis

Feel free to skip this section if you don’t feel like reading about my personal circumstances or general moping. To be honest, I didn’t really want to write this section either, but I couldn’t think of a way to honestly present my motivations for this personal experiment without giving a bit of background context on my life. Again, I wouldn’t mind (would even prefer maybe?) if you skip this section, but who knows, maybe some might also find this useful/relatable?

I haven’t really been productive in terms of research this year. At least for the semester of the academic year, I didn’t really publish any first-author papers or have any ideas that I was really excited about. I had some co-authored papers on which I was either working on or mentoring others on, but to be honest, I don’t think my heart was really in any of those projects either.

From this perspective, every time I opened Twitter, it was like the universe was laughing at me – Everyone is publishing high-impact research except for you! Enjoy graduating in 7+ years, if you even can! I usually get somewhat excited by new ideas, but over time, the emotional cost of looking at my feed started to outweigh the reward for me, so I started avoiding Twitter, or even discussing new ideas with people in real life. I wouldn’t recommend the second half of the previous sentence, though as you can guess from the title, I don’t really miss Twitter.

Second, I also got mono last semester, which reduced my productivity even more and restricted my working hours. I usually started feeling extremely tired by 8pm and had to sleep, which isn’t great when there were many days when I would have research or classes straight from 9am-5pm. I did what I could basically, and that was the projects I already started and felt obligated to work on. But this also fed into the first point in this section and further strengthened the assertion that I was going nowhere fast.

Basically, all of this combined with the fact that I wanted to pivot my research (and also needed to potentially link all of my past research together in a proposal soon) created conditions in which I had no time to really scroll Twitter/read papers there, and also didn’t have any incentive to do so even if I had time.

What purpose does Twitter serve?

My claim is that for people that are non-famous and mostly using Twitter to keep up with research or occasionally post their own, Twitter can almost entirely be replaced by different, and possibly better alternatives. Let’s examine some different benefits and alternatives one-by-one:

Keeping up with the literature

  • Finding things related to your research projects
  • Finding things unrelated to your research projects

For finding things related to my own research projects, I would usually either be doing an active literature review anyway, or (more commonly) others would post related papers on the project channel or DM me directly. One could object that I simply outsourced my reading to others, and you’d be correct, but it’s a somewhat natural process to pass papers around, and I did this for others as well when I found papers related to their work.

For unrelated research, the process above is a little weaker (since people might not directly show you something unrelated to your research), but the natural diffusion process still worked well enough I suppose. I think for people truly concerned about keeping up with the latest research (even if unrelated), looking at arxiv every day or setting many google scholar alerts is probably the way to go.

Promoting your own work

OK, I did do some self promotion on Twitter, and I concede that it’s hard to do this otherwise. I would usually draft tweet threads in a google doc, then use an automated service (I used Buffer) to post all the tweets in the thread at once.

For building a “brand”/following, I’ve never really wanted to do that to be honest. In fact I think I try to cultivate an air of neutrality and boringness on Twitter. I admire people that have a lot of clever quips and can engage in (reasonable) debate on Twitter, but I’ve never quite been able to grasp how to do that myself. I default to either writing in long-form or writing somewhat trite reflections/endorsements (“Was so interesting to work on this paper!”, “Check out our poster at Session 2 on Wednesday!”). I don’t think it’s exactly insincere, but I also can’t figure out a more sincere projection of my personality down to 240 characters most of the time. I would venture that this is true for many others as well. And yes, now that I admitted to being boring, you can unfollow me if you want, but hopefully the content of my posts is interesting enough to stick around for some?

Meeting new people

Like I said, I’m pretty boring on Twitter so I haven’t exactly met many new people through the platform directly, though I have used it to message people I kind of know at conferences to meet up and hang out. I don’t really have much to say on this, though I do meet a fair number of people through email (the boomer way?) or in-person (the best way I think).

Having fun/feeling productive

Back when I used to go on Twitter more often as a first/second year grad student, I often got this expansive and productive feeling after scrolling through papers for a while: “wow, there are so many interesting papers out there! I learned so much!”. It may have been true in some sense, in that I didn’t know that X number of papers existed before, and afterwards I knew they existed, but I doubt that was the most efficient way to achieve this goal (that would probably be looking through arxiv or creating a ritual of scanning conferences for interesting work). If I’m being honest, a lot of the time also wasn’t spent on high-mindedly contemplating research, but on consuming opinions on the latest drama, or miscellaneous fun facts. For drama and fun facts…well, there are also other websites that serve those purposes more directly. It’s easy to feel productive while in reality you’re just gathering vibes.

Slow research

(Anyone who’s possibly going to fund me for anything/give me awards, please skip this paragraph thanks!)

There’s another component to this as well, which is that I really would prefer to work more slowly on things that take a long time. Although I may have published a fair bit in my first few years and even in undergrad, I always doubted how much of a contribution I was really making. Of course, there were some extenuating circumstances as well that prevented me from spending as much time on improving my skills as I would’ve liked to, but if I’m being honest, it was also just easier to stay at the same rough technical level at which I produced my first papers. After all, the publication cycle is short, and it’s easy to feel like you’re falling behind if you’re not working on more and more things, when everyone seems to be working on and publishing so much. I’m not saying that every research paper has to be a huge leap from the ones before, as that imposes a different kind of pressure, but personally, in hindsight I would have liked to do less, but do better. I probably wouldn’t have published several of my papers if I could redo things, but instead use that time for either more ambitious work, or helped others more, or just sat down with a good RPG which I haven’t done in a while….

I have some interesting projects that will hopefully come out in the next few months, but personally, I really appreciated having time to reflect on the types of research I want to pursue in the future and to start setting my own agenda. I think there’s a certain type of thinking and agenda-setting you can only really do when you’re detached from what others are thinking and the constant stream of information about what’s popular in the moment. There’s a danger to being too detached as well, but I would wager that most of us are more likely to get caught up in the collective and lose our own guiding tastes.

The purpose of this blog

I realized this year that I do have a lot to communicate (outside of research papers), but that Twitter isn’t necessarily the right format for me to do that. I hope to make some informative posts here about research topics I learn about, but also to talk about some meta-aspects of research, as well as random other stuff maybe. That’s a pretty broad mandate, but I guess it’s my blog and I can do whatever??

Returning to Twitter (mindfully)

If you’ve read this far, it probably seems strange for me to now say that I’m returning to Twitter after listing out all the reasons why I’ve found it unnecessary for a year. You might even be wondering why you bothered reading this blog post in the first place if the author is so capricious that they can go back on their conclusion from three paragraphs ago.

I don’t think Twitter is useless either, and I think for the more POST-like applications (as opposed to GET-like applications for lack of better terms), there’s not really a clear substitute right now. After detaching for a while, I do want to re-enter the online community more mindfully as well. The point I wanted to make is that it’s far from necessary to be active on or check Twitter if you’re a researcher, and there may be some benefits to disengaging as well. There may be benefits to posting and checking out highlights occasionally, but what are the real benefits to scrolling through the feed everyday, as opposed to keeping up with papers in other ways? This is probably a question that we should all ask ourselves.