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Meta: The State of SoylentNews and Twitter

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

The Mighty Buzzard writes:

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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Meta: The State of SoylentNews and Twitter | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 128 comments | Search Discussion
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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by MrGuy on Monday December 18 2017, @01:51PM (4 children)

    by MrGuy (1007) on Monday December 18 2017, @01:51PM (#611379)

    Here's the question: do we even care?

    I think you're going to get two answers to this question - either "I don't use it so I don't care," or "I care, therefore I want someone to fix it."

    The thing is, fixing/not fixing the twitter integration is a binary yes/no question. I think the more interesting question is "how important is fixing the twitter integration compared to other priorities?"

    All our admins are volunteers (to whom IMO we're all insufficiently grateful most of the time, myself certainly included). They only have so much time and effort they're willing/able to pour into a project like this. So, to me, the question isn't a binary one - it's where "fix the twitter feed" should fit into other priorities our busy admins might have to make the site better. What are the other items this would compete with for attention?

    My personal view is that this should be a low priority - I think it's a nice potential way to get the site discovered by new users, but it seems pretty clear based on current usage it's not really accomplishing that goal.

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  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday December 18 2017, @02:18PM

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Monday December 18 2017, @02:18PM (#611392) Homepage Journal

    Yeah, that's basically what I want to know. If we've got even a dozen active folks who use Twitter as their primary gateway to SN, I'll probably go ahead and spend a morning automating posting again. It's not a huge time sink keeping up with breaking changes to their API but it is a time sink.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday December 18 2017, @05:38PM

    by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us (6553) on Monday December 18 2017, @05:38PM (#611487) Journal

    The other question is.... how likely are others to find SN from Twitter? (i.e. is it a source to drive referrals to SN?) If not then the ayes and nays should have it. If it's possible that SN ultimately gets more support from having Twitter then it might be worth it. (Even though I'm personally in the "twitter is for twits" camp.)

    --
    This sig for rent.

  • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday December 19 2017, @03:02PM (1 child)

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Tuesday December 19 2017, @03:02PM (#611810) Journal

    Also should consider how much work it is. If a Twitter newsfeed is trivial amount of work, then, yes, do it. But if Twitter in its corporate ways is going to keep breaking the API (where have we seen that tactic before? Let me think... oh yeah, Microsoft!) and make it a lot more work, then have to choose.

    Is there any alternative to Twitter? Some independent system? Maybe make your own Twitter! :D