ELBOW ROOM
This is where I collect and write things, mostly on academe and artificial intelligence. Established in 2010, by Vaishak Belle.
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Twitter/mastodon vs medium/substack vs Wordpress/tumblr for academics.
At lunch the other day I was asked about the relative merits of these platforms. No means an expert as I’ve only been doing this for a few months, although I have my twitter active from 2008 and tumblr from 2010.
I think Twitter/Mas is great for social networking between academic peers but I dislike the character limit and thread based dialogue. Think of the last time you thought a thread was great but a) where is it gone, even if you bookmarked it and b) how do you extract meaningful snippets other than to annoyingly scroll down to the appropriate tweet. Of course the same could be said for a website but a) you can bookmark it using your browser, and b) you can search by title.
Thus for ideas and insights I prefer tumblr, as I’ve written here. It allows for both long form posts but also tweet like bursts.
This leaves substack / medium. I’ve used medium before and it’s good for discovering other long form writing but I find the discovery to be about things like “8 things about social media”, and other buzz feed like posts which I find irritating and there’s constant intimation to sign up for the premium account which just doesn’t make sense (for me). Anyway for writers themselves, medium and substack is about getting subscribers so it kinda works like Wordpress if you want to keep things free, but I find an implicit expectation that you’d be writing longer articles. I do that plenty in my day job, so not quite tempted to use that much energy for my blog. But that’s me. If you think you are likely to write lengthy opinions then go for it.
For now I write on tumblr and post it to twitter, which gives me the benefit of an academic social network whilst removing character limit annoyances.
