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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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  • (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.