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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: 3, Insightful) by beckett on Monday December 18 2017, @10:01PM (2 children)
tbh i don't have a high opinion of twitter et al, but otoh it's one of the simplest ways to get notified and up to date at a glance. Twitter's a water cooler and it's useful whether or not you use your real identity. IMO twitter reaches demographics of people that otherwise wouldn't read soylentnews normally. if one of the goals of this org is to reach a broader audience, use twitter or whatever tools you have to reach those fucks.
Twitter's probably not for most of us here. but 'most of us' probably doesn't resemble most other people that don't read soylent news. rather than shut down the account, i'd encourage the org find someone who sees the potential and knows how to leverage twitter.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 18 2017, @11:08PM (1 child)
Absolutely! Let's get a few dozen SEO folks and marketing droids to boost our numbers. Our shareholders are watching us!
We should also use SN's considerable war chest (thank you, venture capitalism!) to start advertising heavily on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other sites so we can become an incredibly powerful juggernaut, so our investors can get the monetary returns they expect.
Oh, wait....
(Score: 2) by beckett on Wednesday December 20 2017, @08:08PM
At this point in the cartoon, you realize you run out of slippery slope and instead are standing on thin air.
Hold up your "free strawmen" sign and fall to the canyon floor accompanied by a slide whistle noise.