remove the link to twitter/X account #600
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I disagree, the platform still has some reach and we have more than 5k followers. This needs to go to the forum and other maintainers to vote on this if we want to proceed. |
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I agree with @tupui - there does seem to be some attempt to boycott X on various esthetic or political grounds, but I don't think we should join it - and stay neutral. If there are people who would benefit from news from us on X, we should post news there. |
Yes, certainly, there people who benefit - the main beneficiary is called Elon Musk. At some point you cannot remain neutral any more (one cannot stay neutral on a modern cross of circus and Völkischer Beobachter). If you want to stay neutral on a social media, move to a decentralised, politically sane platform, such as Mastodon (and, hey, you can even run your own instance of it). |
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I am +1 on removing the link, although I do not think that discussing that decision is a good use of developer time. If everybody agreed or was ambivalent then it would be a no-brainer. But in the presence of contrary opinions, I think it would be best for everyone involved to save their time for other things. |
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Mastodon and Bluesky are losing traction. All platforms have their supporters and detractors you can find good and bad everywhere. We are definitely not here to do any politics. |
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"some attempt to boycott X" includes dozens of German universities, NWO (Dutch analog of NSF) etc. The last link is short and right on target. In recent years, we have observed that the public discourse on X is increasingly characterized by the spread of misinformation and hate speech, making it difficult to engage in constructive dialogue on the platform. As a science funder, NWO believes it is important to foster connections and contribute to a respectful and inclusive public dialogue. NWO has concluded that X is no longer a platform that adequately facilitates this. Our account and previous posts will remain available, but no new content will be posted. NWO thanks everyone who has followed us through X in recent years and hopes to continue to reach our followers through our other channels. Want to stay up to date on calls and developments around Dutch science? Then subscribe to our newsletter. NWO will also remain active on the NWO website and on LinkedIn |
They are not losing traction at all - in particular Bluesky as growing very fast right now (currently at 27 million and growing at a rate of 2 users per second right now. Keeping a link to Twitter on your website has become a political statement. Thus, removing it is neutrality, keeping it - not at all. |
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We can remove the link when we have reason to believe that no-one will benefit from the information. Perhaps there will be a time when X becomes irrelevant for the sharing of useful information - but that time is not now, and I don't think it should be our role to vote on whether that should be so. |
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On 11 January 2025 12:37:27 GMT-06:00, Pamphile Roy ***@***.***> wrote:
Mastodon and Bluesky are losing traction. All platforms have their supporters and detractors you can find good and bad everywhere. We are definitely not here to do any politics.
Staying on twitter/X is a political statement - and hopefully not the one you want to make.
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@matthew-brett I find a link to twitter/X an endorsement of it, and triggering. Why you think it's OK to keep it is beyond me - perhaps you simply have never had politics catching up with you in a bad way? Nowadays one cannot even see what's posted on twitter/X without logging in there, by the way. |
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As I say - if it becomes clear that no-one is using the information on X, then we can remove the link. |
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How do you objectively decide whether any subscriber to a closed resource benefits from it directly? One can always argue that the shareholders/owners of such a platform benefits from the mere presence of SciPy there, thus SciPy could never leave due to this? |
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Let us keep an eye on the number of users of X and its competitors. |
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Right now @dimpase you're the only one making this political and are using a passionate language. We are three people with the credentials and we only ever post SciPy updates and never give any likes nor retweets. |
I am not the only one, by far. You also spread lies (from X, I suppose) here about the popularity of Mastodon and Bluesky. Last but not the least, this issue is limited to removing the link to X on the website. |
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Add me to the list of people who would recommend removing the X link. It's a private platform and the owner is primarily responsible for politicizing it. Institutions that continue to use X are signaling their tolerance for the way the platform is being run. Remaining on X under the present circumstances undermines the commitment that SciPy makes to the values expressed in its own code of conduct, which harms its reputation as a leading open-source scientific software project. |
Thing is.... follower count really doesn't much if the algorithm favors sensationalist posts While I know this thread is about removing the X link. Obv that would mean there is no longer a 'stream' that people can follow to keep up with it except on github. But the problem right now is that X really isn't a good way of sending out news. For example, if you don't have an account (and as people here have stated, people are deleting twitter. just a fact) the view of the scipy twitter page is this:
You can't see it. not even the profile, let alone any of the tweets Atleast with Mastodon people can see all the posts without needing any account AND a Mastodon automatically is available via RSS so you also have an instant RSS feed! |
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I would be perfectly happy to add a Mastodon link, if that's what you're proposing. However, I am sure no-one would disagree that the current wave of boycotts on X have a very strong partisan flavor - and in particular, there is a very strong association between having (in the US sense) progressive views and animus towards Elon Musk and X. We can't afford to go down that track - Scipy is not the right organization for political campaigns. We explicitly stay out of politics in general, and partisan politics in particular. And we must show ourselves open to communication with people of a range of political views, including those currently in the majority of the US voting public. |
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There is more than the US in this world. In many places X is still being used heavily and not just by nefarious actors. By such logic we (the scientific community) should stop our relationship with META. But we don't because of CZI. So making a choice here to remove X and not the rest would be at least hypocritical.
I am afraid such micro aggressive threats don't have a hold. Are you actually thinking about contributing to SciPy? Because I don't see much from you otherwise. |
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On Mastodon, we actually have an account there. It just did not get much traction. Happy to add the link if not somewhere already. |
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A few comments:
@tupui please do not label someone's first comment - which is a personal viewpoint and perfectly valid - as a threat. |
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To add to what Ralf said
I disagree with the framing that removing this link would mean partaking in a boycott, or stopping a significant relationship between SciPy and X. For me, it is a pragmatic decision, based on the observations that:
Whether one agrees with the perspective in the last point or not, it seems clear to me that respecting that viewpoint and avoiding a heated argument here is the healthier option for our community. I do not see what we lose in that outcome.
Questions about harm to our community are inherently political. Answering yes or no to this proposal does not sidestep the political issues raised, that's just one of the difficult things one has to face when considering how to foster inclusive and safe communities. |
As I've implied already - I don't think anyone would think it controversial if I said that disapproving of X in principle is very common among progressives, and relatively rare if you a not a progressive. Now - I am also willing to bet that in this thread, and probably within the Scipy community, we have relatively more progressives than not. So, if it came to a vote, I suspect removing X would be popular, and that vote would, if analyzed, turn out to break on clear partisan lines. I was hoping that we could avoid that kind of thinking, by being strict in saying - we don't take political positions. However, if we are not strict in that position, I'm afraid we're heading for a very unproductive discussion, and an eventual veto, which will likely cause needless, and perhaps substantial harm. So I'm going advocate taking a strict not-political position again. |
This is unhelpful as we do not have agreement on what is and is not political. If this line of argument is maintained then we are stuck talking past each other. |
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I agree with Ralf's points. I also don't have a twitter account. Twitter has, for me personally, always been a insufferable cesspool even before we had any controversy over its hostile takeover. Many social outcries have been silenced and continuing on that platform by the past and present owners. So this is not something new by any means hence I am having a bit of difficulty understanding what tipped the scales. Yet all the parties mentioned above kept on using Twitter including institutions such as NWO (as an alumni of TUDelft and TU/e and through funded individuals I worked with) with no problem at all. And there are much much more important things today that requires major institutions to take part, but don't. So this gives me the impression that this is a pretty US localized and quite frankly a passive-aggressive stance on a product to make a point between the owner and the users of certain stance. However the rest of the community still use this tool (much to my regret) and get pinged sometimes if we say SciPy version 6.5 is out. And that's pretty much all we do about it. Now that there is a fallout involving directly certain members of the community, boycotting has nothing to do with whether we have a button or not. I don't have any data but if judging by how SciPy uses social media, this has not been clicked much if at all. The argument here is a tongue-in-cheek "we did it, you should do it too" to join the group who is partaking in this and seeking for validation which I have to agree with @matthew-brett. To be honest, it does not grant a discussion of this scale. But if people want to pile up on us, which happened many times, we can't stop them. However, historically, similar movements had absolutely zero effect on what they initially claimed it would have. Not only political but events like Reddit mod strike, countless StackOverflow boycotts, Twitter API saga, Cambridge Analytica, and other way too many items had the initial jerk response only to regress to the mean afterwards. For me it is even less of an effective strategy to use a non-social tool to make a statement of any kind. My vote is to add equally inactive Mastodon/BlueSky links and put a sentence, if really needed, that we are not active on twitter, which is accurate. I don't have a strong opinion on the existence of a button as I think this is a futile armchair attempt. But I have no objections to remove it either. However, the reasoning for it given above is definitely not something I can get behind at all. I view it as a double standard to everything else happening elsewhere. Thus, I don't want to have any implications that SciPy supports that particular view. So if we are removing it, let's do it because of inactivity and not this, whatever it is. On a final note, it seems to me that if you really have a beef with the owner of the platform, keep using the name twitter and the blue logo. It appears that, it is a more effective tool to drive him up the wall rather than declaring your departure from the platform which probably is making him happier. PS: let's indeed not consider each other's points as threats. |
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It can be difficult to tell whether a subject is political, but when an issue becomes partisan - then surely, it is not controversial that is political. To keep to things that nearly all of can agree on, I imagine we would all accept that boycotting X is a partisan issue. Of course each side will say that the other is wrong. Scipy should not be in the situation where it is adjudicating on partisan issues. I do agree mainly with @ilayn - but I think we should strictly avoid being seen to attempt to antagonize anyone - including Elon Musk. |
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In the spirit of compromise, can I suggest the following:
The last is obviously to avoid the appearance of joining a partisan wave of boycotts, while being formal in taking general concerns about X seriously. |
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Sounds good to me, though possibly we can accelerate the last point a bit to "when this wave dies down". There is not much left to salvage on that platform; at least I got that impression from what I have read from the links in this thread. |
How would this same argument not apply to other unreputable forums like 4Chan? Surely there is at least one person that would benefit from posting information there, but is it worth the damage to your reputation? |
They have a strong partisan flavor because the owner of the site is actively spending money to take away the rights of queer people. More specifically, trans people like myself. I don't want to be involved in this fight, but how am I supposed to sit back while some asshole spends money to deny me my medicine |
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I scrolled through the SciPy posts on X of the last two years and wondered if that content mandated a prominent X link on each SciPy page (which is also underscored by @rgommers comment). |
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@DietBru - yes - thanks - also perfectly reasonable. |
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@ilayn there is nothing US-centric or passive-aggressive in this issue - if you followed the European news lately, you could have seen Musk insulting various European politicians on X, you could have seen more reports on X meddling in European politics. People like me and you, and other minorities, are now the legitimate (for X) target of X's bots and bigots. X (and FB, to a lesser extent) have become a modern version of Völkischer Beobachter. It is beyond me how anyone can advocate running a science feature in Völkischer Beobachter - despite the latter being popular in some crowds, you should have principles - just as you won't come to a Nazi demonstration with a SciPy poster... |
I am not asking you to antagonise anyone. I am asking you to stop endorsing X by having a link to X prominently on the homepage. Being neutral/apolitical doesn't mean you tolerate anything political - to the contrary, it means to forbid anything which can be deemed political (BLM/MAGA etc etc etc) - and certainly a link to X can very well be deemed political. |
searching on Mastodon does prominently show, as the 1st hit, the following account: Right now it has 324 followers. It hasn't posted since mid-Aug 2024. Few hours ago it only had 301 followers, but, apparently, this very issue resulted in more follows :-) No wonder it's not popular, as you don't have a link to it on the homepage. I hope such a link won't be seen as a political statement, as opposed to X. (if you come to use/explore/enhance SciPy you'll be not against FOSS, right?) |
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@dimpase - I think everyone's agreed that it's reasonable to put a Mastodon link up - no need to argue there. For the comparisons of X to the Nazi newspaper (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%B6lkischer_Beobachter) - I'm sure you'd accept that there are many people who would not accept that as reasonable. In part, what I'm trying to do here is make sure we don't end up having that discussion here - as I don't think it would be helpful or useful. |
Good idea. In addition, we could replace the gap left by X icon that is prominent on every page with a Discourse icon that links to the forum since that is objectively the best way to keep up to date with all things SciPy. |
The problem is that many people nowadays do accept this as quite reasonable, and for good reasons. The only way to remove this tension is to remove the X link. |
The problem with that logic is - as I said - that some version of this statement has become somewhat common in progressive discourse - and the opposite (vigorous defense of free-speech against pervasive government censorship, open-source algorithms and moderation machinery, etc) is much more common outside progressive discourse. I don't think we should adjudicate - I think this is a partisan political issue on which we should stay neutral. |
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I think we kind of established a consensus so I would suggest let's conclude it while it is still current. |
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@matthew-brett |
let's go ahead with making them much less prominent, in line with #600 (comment), and revisit at some point in the future. PR welcome! |
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@tupui I edited my comment above and will try to clarify below. As @rgommers noted (thank you!), I did not intend my comment as a threat, but acknowledge that I could have phrased it more constructively. My point was that the current association with X discourages participation from potential contributors, such as myself, who value the kind of inclusive culture that the SciPy aims to promote. These values are articulated in the code of conduct and they are not neutral. Having the (outdated) bird icon on the homepage explicitly directs newcomers to X as one of the primary ways to engage with the SciPy community. I think that maintaining such an official presence on X signals a tolerance for abuse and misinformation that reflects poorly on SciPy. Regarding the slippery-slope arguments about other associations, these overlook that each of these associations must be addressed in its specific context and evaluated individually against SciPy community norms. The topic of this issue is X, not Meta, GitHub, American politics, or anything else. While I have not yet contributed much directly to SciPy outside of commenting on a few issues, I originally mentioned my own interest in contributing because I am actively trying to incorporate open-source scientific software development into my research program. This is because I think doing so (a) is a valuable contribution to science and (b) could be a great way to involve students from a variety of different backgrounds in the scientific research enterprise. I had a very good experience with JOSS and pyOpenSci on an open-source software project that depends on SciPy, and have been impressed with the emphasis that those organizations, SciPy, NumPy, and many other open-source development communities place on inclusivity, which is especially important for students. The bird icon is ultimately a small thing, but it is one of many things that I and other potential contributors take into account when choosing to contribute our own limited time and resources and encouraging others to do the same. |
Practical point: which logo should we use to link to the forum? The Discourse logo isn't prominent on the forum, instead the Scientific Python logo is. Is there a monochrome version of the Scientific Python logo that would be suitable to use in this place @stefanv @jarrodmillman ? |
META I have trouble connecting it to recent Zuck's declarations, such as In contrast to CZI, X and its fans and the boss have come to stand for everything that is forbidden in paragraph 5 of Specific Guidelines of SciPy's [Code of Conduct] (https://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/dev/conduct/code_of_conduct.html)
Not at all, see above. Retaining X is basically undermining SciPy's Code of Conduct, as was already mentioned here. |
The scientific python website uses the discourse logo for this purpose (although it would admittedly be confusing if they used their own logo) |
https://github.com/scientific-python/scientific-python-archive/tree/main/branding/logo |
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@dimpase I think you have made your point (as has @matthew-brett). I'd like to ask you to take a break from replying since the back and forth is unlikely to help right now. It looks like we're heading to a resolution here, thanks @DietBru, @lucascolley and @j-bowhay and everyone else who weighed in for helping steer things into a constructive direction. We'll coordinate on a PR. |
With many scientific orgs, and not only, getting off twitter, it would be timely if SciPy followed suit.
We listed some reasons at sagemath/website#487
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