Dr. Ally/Allie Louks

Yeah.

Okay.

So I had just finished a very long day of teaching.

And on my lunch break, I had taken this picture of myself with my hardbound copy of my thesis, ready to deposit in the university library, because that's the kind of final hurdle that you have to get through for your PhD to be done, basically.

I had picked up my two copies of my thesis.

I put one in the university library and I got my personal copy and I took a photo with it and I put it on Twitter.

Well, formerly Twitter.

I kind of think of them as slightly separate things now because the version of Twitter that I was used to to talk to people in my field whilst we were all in lockdown just no longer exists.

It's a very different platform now than it was back then.

So basically, I put it on there because I was used to using it to talk to my not very many at all followers who are basically all academics.

And I thought I should let them know that I'm done in case they're working on any projects that need a postdoc.

And then they'll think of me.

And then it kind of broke containment immediately.

I guess for the first 24 hours, actually, maybe even best part of 48 hours, it was like skyrocketing in terms of the engagement.

But the people who were commenting were really friendly.

They were just congratulating me on my accomplishment, which was very nice.

And I really appreciated it, even though it was slightly discomforting to have that many people seeing my face.

And then it got retweeted by a couple of kind of big right wing accounts who were, I suppose, not necessarily criticizing it, more kind of mocking it or mocking me or the institution at large.

And then it got

nasty for a little while it kind of was bouncing around a side of the platform that I had never encountered before and the comments were unhinged um and a lot of them gained quite a lot of traction you know they became the kind of most liked ones because it was kind of blue tick people interacting with each other because they get money from that