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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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 18 2017, @03:54PM
I agree that it doesn't seem necessary to continue with whatever you were doing on Twitter, especially if the staff here didn't notice it was not working right for some time, and that further, there didn't seem to be any discussion here about the problems of social network APIs that caused the issues that upset services that regular Soylenters depended on.
I didn't even know you posted to Twitter, and if you had other social media activities, I don't know about those, either. I expect there are a lot of people here that use more services than me, but it still seems like no one noticed.
There's no reason to be entirely against social media activity, though--this forum is a social network, and really it is best to remain pragmatic about this. I recognize you have to reach an audience, if only to draw them here and hope they become regulars in the audience I am a part of. There are times when the word of the user's mouth is not always enough... I couldn't tell you if any of my friends or associates come here, but we all use pseudonyms we have not shared with each other.