What is this
Academic social media used to be funny. Then everyone moved to LinkedIn and started being honored. 4nix is the break room: a discussion board for commenting on ridiculous posts, joking around, and finding your people. Named after the fornix, an arch of white matter connecting the hippocampus to the rest of the brain, with the arch traded for the 4 of a certain image board. Take it as seriously as that suggests.
2 threads · 5 academics of varying seniority
Getting a LinkedIn post in here
- Paste the link. On any LinkedIn post, use the three dots → Copy link to post, then paste it into New thread. We fetch the text and author for you. If LinkedIn hides it behind a login wall, paste the text yourself.
- Phone share sheet. Install 4nix to your home screen (browser menu → Add to Home Screen). 4nix then appears in the Share menu on Android, so you can share straight from the LinkedIn app.
- Bookmarklet. Drag this to your bookmarks bar, then click it while looking at a LinkedIn post: → 4nix this
Reactions are peer review
- lol · Actually funny
- humbled · So humbled to see this
- accept · Accept without revisions
- reviewer 2 · Major revisions required
- p < .05 · Barely significant
- citation needed · Source?
Boards
- 💼 LinkedIn Lunacy · Bring us the post. We'll take it from here.
- 🙏 Humbled to Announce · Thrilled, honored, humbled. Mostly humbled.
- 🧐 Reviewer 2 · Minor revisions. 47 of them.
- 💸 Grant Season · Not discussed at this time.
- 🏨 Conference Circuit · Question-shaped comments welcome.
- 🧪 Lab Life · The freezer alarm is not a drill.
- 🧠 Meta · About 4nix itself.
House rules
- Punch at ideas, posts, and institutions. Not at grad students, and not at protected characteristics.
- Anonymous means anonymous. Don’t try to unmask people, and don’t post private information.
- Screenshots of public posts are fair game. DMs are not.
- The report button exists. Admins can retract anything. Reviewer 2 is watching.
Identity
Sign-in is through LinkedIn (or ORCID) so the crowd is the same crowd, but we never post on your behalf and never read your feed. Every account gets a stable pseudonym for anonymous posting, and nothing on the site links the two.
Privacy
The whole policy: 4nix keeps what it needs to show your posts, and nothing else. No analytics, no tracking pixels, no third-party cookies, no ads, no external fonts, no email from us ever.
- What signing in hands over. LinkedIn gives us a stable account id, your name, your profile photo and your email address. ORCID gives us your iD and your name, and nothing else — not even an email. That is the entire scope we ask for, so we cannot see your feed, your connections or your messages, and we cannot post as you.
- Your email. Used for one thing: checking whether you are an admin. It is never shown on the site and never passed to anyone. Sign in with ORCID and we never have one at all.
- What you add yourself. Handle, headline, a link to your LinkedIn profile and your ORCID iD if you want them shown, and whatever you post, comment, react to or report.
- Cookies. One, so you stay signed in for thirty days; the server keeps only a hash of it. Signing in sets two more that last ten minutes and are dropped on the way back.
- Posts you paste. We save a snapshot of the public page — author, text, image — read the same way any link preview reads it. Nobody is logged in on the other end.
- Anonymity has a limit. Nothing in the interface connects your pseudonym to your account, and no other user can make that link. But both sit in the same database row, so whoever runs the server could. Treat it as cover from the crowd, not from us.
- Deleting. Deleting a post or comment pulls it off the site immediately, though the row stays in the database marked deleted. To have an account and everything attached to it actually erased, ask on GitHub.