Certainly meeting people in person is a different story than discussions via on-line platforms. However, you have a strong point here. Web technology increasingly enables us to connect to researchers all over the globe - many we would never meet in person. Furthermore, you become able to talk to people from a large diversity of domains, which is fully in-line with the growing tendency of multi-disciplinary research.

To me, it is just a matter of time that also platforms such as RG are ranked and it might even come a time in which it becomes beneficial to mention your activities and connections in your CV, or including it in evaluations of research organizations.

The tricky parts however are (1) how to measure the value of your contributions - to my understanding the RG score does not fit this purpose (see also https://www.researchgate.net/post/Is_it_positive_for_ResearchGate_to_use_a_visible_performance_index_to_qualify_all_researcher_participants), and (2) to find out in which situations on-line platforms are most helpful (discussing initial ideas, building a virtual research community that follows the same research question, extending argumentations in a way that they are as valuable as a research paper with references, promoting your own research results, etc.). The amount of our working time spend on these platforms might be adjusted accordingly.

Certainly meeting people in person is a different story than discussions via on-line platforms. However, you have a strong point here. Web technology increasingly enables us to connect to researchers all over the globe - many we would never meet in person. Furthermore, you become able to talk to people from a large diversity of domains, which is fully in-line with the growing tendency of multi-disciplinary research.

To me, it is just a matter of time that also platforms such as RG are ranked and it might even come a time in which it becomes beneficial to mention your activities and connections in your CV, or including it in evaluations of research organizations.

The tricky parts however are (1) how to measure the value of your contributions - to my understanding the RG score does not fit this purpose (see also https://www.researchgate.net/post/Is_it_positive_for_ResearchGate_to_use_a_visible_performance_index_to_qualify_all_researcher_participants), and (2) to find out in which situations on-line platforms are most helpful (discussing initial ideas, building a virtual research community that follows the same research question, extending argumentations in a way that they are as valuable as a research paper with references, promoting your own research results, etc.). The amount of our working time spend on these platforms might be adjusted accordingly.