It's Monday, February 6th, 2017, and you're listening to Inquiring Minds.

I'm Kishore Hari.

Indrae will be back next week.

Each week, we bring you a new in-depth exploration of the space where science, politics, and society collide.

We endeavor to find out what's true, what's left to discover, and why it all matters.

You can find us online at motherjones.com

slash inquiringminds, inquiringshow.tumbler.com on Twitter or Facebook. And you can subscribe

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So I work at a university, and one of the biggest conversations that you hear inside academic research centers is whether scientists should engage in social media, which is a weird question in this day of age where social media dominates the landscape.

And scientists are people too. So why shouldn't they be on social media connecting and engaging all different

publics and you hear in response all of these examples of where scientists have incredibly

failed at getting a message across on social media, whether it's Twitter,

Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, and a million others.

Oftentimes, the examples cited show the invasion of trolls that dissect and affect the message,

oftentimes in the context of climate change. And also just the

time investment to do it well. Well, this week I wanted to have a different perspective of

successes of science reaching out into the world of social media. So I have on Nate Allen. He's a

chemist that works in the private sector,

but he's most famous for being the lead moderator for Reddits are science, which is one of the

largest subreddits on the entire site. For those that are not familiar with Reddit, it's sort of

labeled as the place where conversation happens

on the internet. It's one of the top 10 most visited websites in the world where communities

...