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: 4, Funny) by inertnet on Monday December 18 2017, @03:05PM (5 children)
Maybe we should impose a 140 character per posting limit..
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday December 18 2017, @04:28PM
The the IRC bot when it starts to work again could re-tweet all our posts as tweets and not just posts. Double our social media exposure. Awesome! But I do wonder how long it would take before we are shut down by Twitter for various hatecrimes.
That said I didn't even know there was an IRC bot posting headlines to Twitter. So it going down is more or less a non issue for me. As someone else mentioned, if nobody noticed or complained for about a month and a half then we might as well just let it rest in peace.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday December 18 2017, @04:43PM (3 children)
It's 280 characters now. Pretty soon we can fit War and Peace in a tweet.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 18 2017, @05:11PM (1 child)
War has three letters, Peace has five. I'm pretty sure they both already fit into a tweet together.
However I also notice that you can fit more War than Peace into twitter comments. ;-)
[Note: Yes, I know what War and Peace actually refers to. No need to educate me on that.]
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Monday December 18 2017, @05:32PM
#LittleRocketMan [twitter.com] says I declared war in a tweet, I didn't. Maybe soon!
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday December 18 2017, @09:56PM
Perhaps it could be programmed to do something interesting like retweet all the +5 comments, or the -5 comments if there ever are any, (or 280ish characters of it ...) in a thread under the topic it has shared.