I'll have to go ahead and strongly disagree with you on some points. I don't think steemit should ever be the go-to place for science as long as money remains the main force of influence. Money is, by and large, very easy for large corporations to obtain huge quantities of, and by its very nature it can easily be thrown around and make a mess of things if it wants. See also the way that corporations have astroturfed and guided conversations and paid shills to keep discourse on a certain given pathway on websites like reddit.
To safeguard against this kind of activity it's much the same way any good old democracy would safeguard against such abuses, it would be left up to an informed, involved citizenry to defend themselves against such tactics of manipulation that are designed to weaken the democracy and misguide the public.
I personally think that in order to do the most good, science writing needs to be aimed at the layperson. Pop-sci is easily digestible and very... popular for good reason. Apolitical science is boring. It needs to be pushing the limits. It needs to push an agenda. Without people pushing necessary agendas, without educating the general public, we're going to be a lot worse off than we already are as far as losing ground to the anti-science crowd.
Wait, what the hell am I talking about. Am I drunk. Who knows. All I know is that science writing is very dry, very boring, and only read by currently science-minded people. We need to change that if we want to win the hearts and minds of those are aren't already so hell-bent on learning more about science, because the future of our planet literally depends on it.
I do agree with a lot that you just said. However, the one limitation that science has it that it is fact based and should not be appealing to emotions or public opinion. That does extend somewhat into science blogging. For example, if somebody makes some "pseudo-scientific" (PS) claim, a science blogger will answer with dry data (because that is what science is based on). The PS will heavily rely on non-factual emotional and vague language and maybe a vast amount of information, that may not even be applicable. However, a science blogger still has to argue based on data, with sources that are carefully selected. If not, it is not scientific. It is a bit of a disaster and I think as a science writer you always have a bit of an disadvantage.
Do you have any suggestions how to possibly overcome this dilemma? Cheers!
Write from the heart, but cite from the head.
Don't let the facts get in the way of the flow of the argument. Ground the argument in facts, but do not make the writing unapproachable or unattractive to read. It should be easily understood and very digestible by those with basic reading skills.
I'm not saying make up nonsense and nonfacts, I'm just saying that there is already a clear abundance of material that reads like stuff out of poorly written textbooks, so why should we be emulating what's been shown to not work as far as engagement of normies goes?
I really like this!
Thank you for your input. Cheers!
This is why finding a way to reach them, where traditional science communication (other blogs etc) has largely failed, is important. It's why I wrote this and what I would like people to think about.
You know what comes to mind? Think about... what's the name... damn, it's that guy that draws those fat people and those cats but he mentions science-ish things sometimes in his cartoons... oh, the oatmeal. He's wildly popular and though his writing isn't my style I can see why people like the stuff. Can't you assemble some sort of stem super team to make original art and videos and other content? You also need creative writers, not just technical science writers.
They're fully shilled-out now, but there are lots of science channels on youtube, for example, that do quite well, and they're all a lot less technical and more visual but at least attempt to confer some knowledge to the viewer. Think kurzegeishtichgecl or whatever, as terrible that channel is at misinterpreting data or misrepresenting facts, the guy with the accent and the animated birds really does draw a crowd.
Finding someone who wants to make short creative comic style science content sounds like a really good idea. Like the oatmeal or xkcd or something yeah...
A comic can be done with 1-3 people, artist and 1 or 2 writers (maybe 1 funny person and 1 science person at most, can also be one person who can write well for both sides of it).
A video series would be easier if it was live action than animation, but if you go a dual route of monetizing and publishing on non steem-related platforms in addition to uploading to dtube then the costs can probably be absorbed fairly quickly.
I myself would rather enjoy seeing a steemstem branded video series that can rival the quality of the other popular shows, it would create a constant source of publicity for the platform and for the group, and it could be (at least for now, until they try their funny business if it gets popular) above the realm of corporate interference regarding how topics are discussed. It's fairly annoying to see that every other video, or every video, on youtube is actually just an advertisement paid for by a certain company that wants you to think a certain way about some product of theirs, even in science videos.