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posted by on Monday December 18 2017, @08:33PM   Printer-friendly
from the stupid-blue-bird dept.

So, apparently around November 5th we stopped posting to Twitter. We didn't find out until around the end of that month and when we did nobody had the time and/or ability to look into why until this past week.

Now how we get our headlines over to Twitter is overly complicated and, frankly, idiotic. It's done by one of our IRC bots pulling headlines from the RSS feed and posting them on Twitter as @SoylentNews. The bot was written back in 2014 with hand-rolled (as opposed to installed via package manager) Python libraries and hasn't been updated since. This was breakage that should absolutely have been expected to happen. Twitter's penchant for arbitrarily changing their unversioned API means you either keep on top of changes or expect things to break for no apparent reason.

Here's the question: do we even care? We can either find someone who's willing to rewrite the bot to a new Twitter library, do it the sane way as either a cron or slashd job, or just say to hell with it since we only have two hundred or so followers on Twitter anyway. What say you, folks?


[TMB Note]: Twitter's who-to-follow algorithms really impressed me this morning when I logged in to manually post this story. How did they know we were all huge @JustinBieber and @BarackObama fans?


[Update]: We're again annoying Twitter users by spreading relative intelligence across their platform of choice. Credit goes to Crash for wisely pointing out that we don't have to code everything ourselves.

 
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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Popeidol on Monday December 18 2017, @12:40PM (5 children)

    by Popeidol (35) on Monday December 18 2017, @12:40PM (#611360) Journal

    Right now, anybody who solely consumes SN via twitter has no idea a poll is taking place. Maybe we should manually tweet this one time to get their input?

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +3  
       Insightful=3, Total=3
    Extra 'Insightful' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   5  
  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday December 18 2017, @12:48PM

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Monday December 18 2017, @12:48PM (#611361) Homepage Journal

    Probably a good idea. Done.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by DavePolaschek on Monday December 18 2017, @01:56PM

    by DavePolaschek (6129) on Monday December 18 2017, @01:56PM (#611380) Homepage Journal

    Thanks for suggesting this. I consumed SN via twitter and had no idea...

  • (Score: 2) by bart9h on Monday December 18 2017, @03:08PM (2 children)

    by bart9h (767) on Monday December 18 2017, @03:08PM (#611412)

    And those who solely consume SN via RSS have no idea either.

    Why isn't the new polls being announced on RSS?

    • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday December 18 2017, @03:18PM (1 child)

      by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Monday December 18 2017, @03:18PM (#611416) Homepage Journal

      Because that's the first time it's been suggested to my knowledge.

      --
      My rights don't end where your fear begins.
      • (Score: 5, Funny) by MostCynical on Monday December 18 2017, @08:40PM

        by MostCynical (2589) on Monday December 18 2017, @08:40PM (#611559) Journal

        Soylentnews, where everyone is very busy fixing things, until they find new ways to make their lives harder.

        --
        "I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex