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

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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  • (Score: -1) by fakefuck39 on Monday December 18 2017, @11:09PM (3 children)

    by fakefuck39 (6620) on Monday December 18 2017, @11:09PM (#611624)

    sounds like you're the person who gets fired for having an attitude destructive to the goals of the team. i'm assuming the goal of a site like this is to have users. dumping users is idiotic, and people who would suggest doing so fails the goal of the site. of course i may be wrong, and the people who created this just really want 10 people talking to each other in a private chat. they should all get a room and get this thing off the web then. which i do believe was in my original suggestion.

  • (Score: 2) by acid andy on Monday December 18 2017, @11:48PM (2 children)

    by acid andy (1683) on Monday December 18 2017, @11:48PM (#611641) Homepage Journal

    OK, I'm willing to bury my flaming for one second to consider your point. I'll grant you that a dwindling user base is not necessarily a good goal for this site to have.

    However, I'm just not seeing that dumping the twitter account would have lost all that many users. I don't get where (like, what part of your ass) you keep pulling this 10 users figure from? I could probably think of 2-3 times that if I just counted the hardcore that have written hundreds or thousands of posts and post many times a month. And that's not even counting ACs. Someone else estimated there are thousands of registered users, maybe over 7000.

    Out of 200 twitter followers I bet quite a few browse the site directly and of those that don't a good few probably lost interest a while back, so I'm not buying this 200 vs 10 comparison.

    --
    If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 19 2017, @04:46PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 19 2017, @04:46PM (#611859)

      hey i don't use twitter but I remember reading that bots were an issue, and people like wanna be celebs or just the celebs themselves, or sales people, or people that need validation and will take it any way they could -- could spend $10 or more to some guy in the internet who will then bam add 100, 1000, 10000 followers just like that

      all compromised and bot accounts and stuff like that.

      the idea is that people then see you have a lot of followers and might read what you post

      soylent here doesnt seem to have decided that bot followers contribute to the forums, or that twitter bots arent a thing anymore.

      however, there were also bots that just latched onto accounts in an effort to then introduce a sexy woman that totally doesnt want to turn into a male in another country that is intending on stealing money from you in some way.

    • (Score: 0) by fakefuck39 on Wednesday December 20 2017, @04:27AM

      by fakefuck39 (6620) on Wednesday December 20 2017, @04:27AM (#612150)

      I've registered about 30 accounts over time, as I've forgotten passwords and got sick of low karma posting limits. 7000? yeah retard. there are clearly 7000 uniq users reflected in the comments here. or, you know, it's 10 of you idiots over and over again. the op idiot is literally asking people on the site whether they care about people who read the stuff here outside of this site, and you 10 of course say "no, twitter is useless to us, dump it." that's a loser that not only does not bring any benefit to the site, he is actually damaging to the site, and does not realize he is a retard. you know, like you 10 retards.