Not sure this is in the right category, but figured I’d put this here because it has to do with outreach. I’d like to start by saying I love the community and discussions as is here and think it strikes a wonderful balance between discussion of Stan itself and the latest in Bayesian statistics. The community here is one of the reasons why Stan has stayed as one of my go-to tools for use in my projects and I look forward to its future development and progression.
Thinking about what I’ve read in this prior thread (Addressing Stan speed claims in general), I was wondering whether many of you guys here are active on Reddit. Stan gets discussed sometimes on r/statistics, and it seems like some unfair comments about Stan’s performance and rigidity are taken as gospel with no regular Stan users offering counterpoints. For instance, I was reading one particular thread about the state of Julia for statistics (https://www.reddit.com/r/statistics/comments/gdg6w2/s_julia_programming/), where comments end up discussing Stan and Turing.jl’s potential for surpassing Stan down the line in performance and functionality (though acknowledging Stan’s stability and community). It would be helpful in threads such as these for folks familiar with Stan under the hood to comment about what the Stan dev team has in the works and improvements that are on the roadmap.
I was thinking then it might be worthwhile for users of the Stan Discourse to occasion r/statistics as time permitted to address user questions and concerns and push back against unfair or incorrect assessments (I’m not quite versed enough in statistics or software development at this point, but have tried jumping in on previous Stan-related Reddit discussions that discussed things at my level) to reinforce and support Stan’s reputation. With its traffic, Reddit is a fairly important site for generating first impressions and is a place many people turn to initially for questions of all topics after Google, and I think regular involvement on targeted subreddits has proven to be fruitful for shaping the perception and adoption of open source software. I feel that facilitating a regular pipeline of folks who are interested in PPLs and can potentially turn into Stan contributors and developers down the line is important for maintaining the long-term development and community health of Stan. I myself became a Stan user years ago because of an answer Bob Carpenter posted on StackExchange that turned me onto this wonderful platform.
If a lot of folks here also are already on Reddit, I apologize for having the wrong impression! Just noting a (perhaps frivolous) observation that Stans of Stan seem to be more quiet on Reddit.