SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 18 2017, @05:26PM (1 child)
Strange... I thought you guys came from slashdot. Old guys from slashdot know what a troll is - someone who posts fake shit to spam the site. Someone who posts a point and makes fun of your loser ass in the process - that's not a troll. That's someone making fun of you. You remember high school - right? That time people would stuff you into a locker and laugh at you, while making a valid point that you are a loser and a dork, when you convinced yourself that you're just being picked on because your schmart? I guess you really do think you have a lot of users and way too many comments so you should limit them to shit a tiny group of people on here disagree with and mod down?
Actually, I'm wrong. Things get modded down because you dorks can't handle being made fun of - it brings back bad memories of the inside of that locker and masturbating to gif files on your 14 inch CRT while we all got actual pussy. I guess it was a troll then.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Monday December 18 2017, @06:27PM
Ok, I haven't commented yet.
Might as well let it drop. While I don't have first hand information, second hand information from a lot of different sources says that twitter comments tend to be boring and stupid. (This might have to do with the old "80 chars or less per twit" limitation. I believe that's been removed, but there are network effects, and traditions die hard.) As such, I expect most of the folk who post from there reflect then general twitter community.
What you need is a similar agreement with places like Scientific American, New Scientist, python-ideas@python.org, etc. but those places are probably so full with current users that this wouldn't be attractive to them. But it would be nice to improve the quality of posts, which means that if you link it should be with a quality site, and I haven't heard anyone I respect say that twitter qualifies.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.