ML Twitter Has Shifted From Paper Nerds to Model Fandom Culture

joshua_saxe · x · 2026-07-23

The author says they returned to ML Twitter after a long break and noticed a big shift in the culture: the 2010s were full of nerdy arXiv posts about beating Adam or backpropagating through optimizers, while today the discourse feels more like fandom culture, with people arguing over ideologies, models, and labs with little context.

They still think the top 3% of the feed contains real signal and that it can surface things you won’t find elsewhere, but they’re unsure whether the overall effect is positive.

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