They should, but having a medium so naturally capable at relaying, resharing (@ or piblically) & following was a superpower. The loss here is immense.
Mastadon retains a lot of this, but honestly, the lack of search and lack of algorithmic time lines both make it vastly less usable & less enjoyable as a product.
The (shocking) inability to reply, and follow replies, in any kind of coherent form is what has kept me from using Twitter in any regular way - even as a reader.
It is a crime that a generation of users believes that this is what online discussion looks like.
I tried to find something vaguely insightful or interesting to say on threads I was interested in, & would revisit my own posting & scan threads afresh to see how things were developing. It was indeed a bit consuming.
Has anyone made a general search option for Mastodon? That's much of the value in Twitter, ability to search for events anywhere on the service, but for some reason Mastodon actively refuses to implement it.
There's a bunch of people on Mastadon who swear search is the devil & will defederate & call you evil incarnate & curse your name if you so much as hint that you might be thinking about building search.
I hope some day we can subvert them & make it happen & get on with life.
People have made it, been shouted at, and turned it off. There is now one which searches only toots of people who have specifically opted in (which I've not yet got around to doing, but must).
I disagree mainly because I don't think the government can be considered to have done this job sharing information by posting it on a signup required, private platform, regardless of convenience. For the majority of the population who don't use or monitor Twitter, forcing governments to find alternatives is an improvement.
> I disagree mainly because I don't think the government can be considered to have done this job sharing information by posting it on a signup required, private platform, regardless of convenience.
100% agree, if that were the case. Except it isn't. NWS provides numerous different mechanisms by which you can get alerts.
The issue is here is a medium that many people do use, and use fairly consistently, so the government rightly said: oh, we should provide that information through this medium as well as (not instead of) the other mechanisms, thus maximizing the ability for people to access this information.
Most people don't have rss readers, and those that do clearly don't check as frequently as twitter or other social media.
Most people don't have shortwave receivers.
Most people don't use mastodon.
Many (most?) people aren't listening to the radio during the day.
> forcing governments to find alternatives is an improvement.
The government provides numerous other channels. This isn't a matter of the government finding alternatives. The goal of these alerts is to be accessible to as many people as possible. That means if there is a significant audience of any given communication channel, there is an immediate benefit to expanding publication to those channels.
You're acting like the NWS using twitter is restricting access to the information, when the purpose of using twitter is to further expand functionally useful access to it. Saying "don't provide this information on closed/account driven services" just because they're "closed" is counter to the goal of these alerts, which is to inform as many people as possible.
There's still some passable anonymous access still but not great. For many many years Twitter themselves had RSS feeds publicly available... that was the way I followed Twitter folks for a long time.
It's hard to appreciate how much worse Twitter has gotten, and how much sense it made to be there when it was such a vibrant open platform.
I also think another commenter is spot on, that this is/was one of the best most effective ways to get information out fast. If one of your friends notices the alert they'll probably message you even if they're in some other area to let you know. The ability of any random thing to quickly get visible & boosted is unparalleled, especially for a general purpose communication network.
Cynicism is fine but it has to be willing to meet with truth to & this all used to make so so much sense, was so good. And again as another great commenter said, there were & ought to be many different ways this stuff was sent out; it's never just been Twitter.
In México by law TV and radio stations MUST provide certain amount of time to government programs or announcements. It's part of the agreement when the government leases them the airwaves.
The USA Should adopt a similar law for certain communication platforms that force them to provide public announcements of general interest. Kind of like the amber alerts in cell phones.
> The USA Should adopt a similar law for certain communication platforms that force them to provide public announcements of general interest. Kind of like the amber alerts in cell phones.
You mean, like the Emergency Alert System, the latest in a series of such requirements in the U.S. that have existed since 1951?
> The government should use open technologies such as email, RSS, and Mastodon.
The role of these announcements is to warn people about a possible life threatening tsunami - they should be using any and as many platforms as possible to get the information out - private, public, open and closed.
Depressing, incomprehensible, and reprehensible. He gets boatloads of government subsidies and still manages to keep enough cynicism in his heart to block government agencies with no agenda other than saving lives.
Calling it cynicism is generous - rather it's abject stupidity. Posters did the work that made the platform valuable, for free, often to the exclusion of posting the data elsewhere. Journalists were basically giving away their own product for free (or at least the part of their product that people want). Why would you want to disrupt any of them? Each content creator that stops or adopts alternatives makes Twitter just a little less valuable. Musk is basically doing a case study in how to degrow a social media company.
They manage a large number of region-specific accounts, so that users can follow just the regions they care about. I imagine the cumulative total exceeds the API limit.
This is a pretty common pattern. Daryl Herzmann's iembot accounts are in a similar situation, I think.
You’re accusing a well-respected government agency of publicly lying. That’s a strong claim. What possible reason would they they have to do that?
And before you say the US Government lies all the time, this is the National Weather Service, not the CIA. They’re about the as non-partisan and trusted as you can get. They don’t run psyops programs, they provide massive piles of free and valuable scientific data to the public every day. They devise sophisticated weather models and run supercomputers. I think they probably know how to use an API.
… why should they be on the hook for something that was and should remain free, especially for an account like this. This is the same social media garbage fire that wrongly labeled the BBC and PBS and state sponsored media.
It may be a point worthy of discussion: Probably in the "old days", government agencies would pay for ads in print newspapers or magazines or for radio ads. Similarly, if the government (except for members of Congress) send mail via US Postal Service, the government has to pay the postage.
So it's not a totally crazy question to ask if a government agency should have to pay a fee to use a private service like Twitter.
Presumably the government agency would have to do a cost/benefit analysis on running their own service versus paying to outsource it.
It was an available. Open public medium with more open interconnectivity than anything else.
It was incredibly easy to share & relay things quickly.
Nothing else in my view comes close. Twitter had won Metcalfe's Law.
Metcalfe's law states that the value or impact of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system.
There's places like Facebook where there's lots of users but most only connect to people they know. Blogs and email can connect people who don't K ow each other, but they have to go make the connection. Twitter has an open culture, where people reshare things, or people converse in threads, & we see those cool things & follow those other people. Twitter was the only successful self growing system on the planet.
Now the connections are all being severed & the network is dying. Such a fucking sad shame pity. This is a burning of the Library of Alexandria of our age. Also no one can afford to look into the archive anymore either so truly some dark Dark Ages shit. Absolutely tragic & monstrous, just vile villianshit.
It’s not the way, it’s a way. Life-saving notices are often redundant to reach as wide of an audience as possible, e.g. public radio, commercial radio, sirens.
Agreed, As a government agency how would you have any confidence that Twitter won't shadow ban your account?
These social media companies aren't Public services, nor have they been deemed critical enough to be required to provide the same facilities as traditionally regulated communication channels.
Because millions of people use the platform regularly.
Why would they _not_ publish alerts on a communication channel that millions of people demonstrably check frequently?
This is a genuine question: do you get this information from their VHF band reporting? or check their website regularly? or their RSS feeds? moreover even if you do, do you think those are likely to more frequently used/checked (or even available) by people than twitter, Facebook, etc?
Twitter should be paying them for providing a valuable service to Twitter’s users. It was a service that increased Twitter’s value, both directly and indirectly by legitimizing it as a source of official information.
The new cash-desperate Twitter instead wanted to squeeze a few bucks from them, and lost a high profile user and became less useful to remaining Twitter customers.
They made use of a functionality that was willingly made available for free. That changed, so they are stopping to use it.
They made no financial profit, but offered a public service of great utility, for a marginal cost to Twitter that is practically zero. In return, it made Twitter's platform more useful. Everyone benefits. It baffles me to see this called "exploitation".
It's tsunami warnings. Do you not want your family to have those? Who gives a shit if they get to spread that information for free, it's not like Twitter's owner couldn't afford it. FFS, it's like I live in a parallel universe.
Why not build some system for it then if it is that important? Send automatic SMS to everyone subscribed, or emails... Or build applications on all possible devices? The possibilities are endless.
One of the strengths of twitter is that you’re able search things you are not subscribed to. It has the ability to act as a Google for current events. If aliens were to arrive by tomorrow and you wanted a quick means to know if anyone else was seeing this shit , twitter would have (probably still is) the best means of finding out so in real time. Similarly this can be the same in the event of a disaster. The event earthquake in Turkey is a good example of this.
They did [1]. The SMS pipeline they built originally relied on Twitter, which deprecated that functionality. Now they're entirely deprecating all of the useful automated posting as well.
Why is this the hill you want to die on? Tsunami warnings are unequivocally a public good.
The NWS like many emergency alert systems has numerous methods for broadcasting alerts. The goal is to ensure that as many people as possible receive those alerts. There are people who use twitter but don't have their radios set to the various NWS radio services, frequently people don't even listen to the radio at all anymore. Similarly most people don't use an rss reader any more so their RSS feeds don't reach those people, and even the people who do use them don't check rss feeds as frequently as social media.
All you need for a twitter feed to be valuable is some number of people who use twitter, but don't listen to the radio, don't regularly check the NWS rss feed, don't have hardware to receive the wireless alert system signals, etc. If there is such a group of twitter users then there's a group of people who can now receive alerts that would not otherwise be available.
So you're saying they should judge the cost of providing twitter the information and users, and if it's not worth it, they should stop using it?
It seems to be that's what they've done. So I'm not sure what your problem is? Why should the government be paying twitter to provide a service to twitter?
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 119 ms ] threadApparently they have an RSS feed, though for some reason they don't advertise that in an HTML <link rel="alternate"> element. https://tsunami.gov/events/xml/PAAQAtom.xml
Mastadon retains a lot of this, but honestly, the lack of search and lack of algorithmic time lines both make it vastly less usable & less enjoyable as a product.
It is a crime that a generation of users believes that this is what online discussion looks like.
I hope some day we can subvert them & make it happen & get on with life.
I disagree mainly because I don't think the government can be considered to have done this job sharing information by posting it on a signup required, private platform, regardless of convenience. For the majority of the population who don't use or monitor Twitter, forcing governments to find alternatives is an improvement.
100% agree, if that were the case. Except it isn't. NWS provides numerous different mechanisms by which you can get alerts.
The issue is here is a medium that many people do use, and use fairly consistently, so the government rightly said: oh, we should provide that information through this medium as well as (not instead of) the other mechanisms, thus maximizing the ability for people to access this information.
Most people don't have rss readers, and those that do clearly don't check as frequently as twitter or other social media.
Most people don't have shortwave receivers.
Most people don't use mastodon.
Many (most?) people aren't listening to the radio during the day.
> forcing governments to find alternatives is an improvement.
The government provides numerous other channels. This isn't a matter of the government finding alternatives. The goal of these alerts is to be accessible to as many people as possible. That means if there is a significant audience of any given communication channel, there is an immediate benefit to expanding publication to those channels.
You're acting like the NWS using twitter is restricting access to the information, when the purpose of using twitter is to further expand functionally useful access to it. Saying "don't provide this information on closed/account driven services" just because they're "closed" is counter to the goal of these alerts, which is to inform as many people as possible.
It's hard to appreciate how much worse Twitter has gotten, and how much sense it made to be there when it was such a vibrant open platform.
I also think another commenter is spot on, that this is/was one of the best most effective ways to get information out fast. If one of your friends notices the alert they'll probably message you even if they're in some other area to let you know. The ability of any random thing to quickly get visible & boosted is unparalleled, especially for a general purpose communication network.
Cynicism is fine but it has to be willing to meet with truth to & this all used to make so so much sense, was so good. And again as another great commenter said, there were & ought to be many different ways this stuff was sent out; it's never just been Twitter.
The USA Should adopt a similar law for certain communication platforms that force them to provide public announcements of general interest. Kind of like the amber alerts in cell phones.
You mean, like the Emergency Alert System, the latest in a series of such requirements in the U.S. that have existed since 1951?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Alert_System
The role of these announcements is to warn people about a possible life threatening tsunami - they should be using any and as many platforms as possible to get the information out - private, public, open and closed.
And, being blunt, effectively 0% of the global population uses RSS for news. Especially time sensitive news.
This is a pretty common pattern. Daryl Herzmann's iembot accounts are in a similar situation, I think.
And before you say the US Government lies all the time, this is the National Weather Service, not the CIA. They’re about the as non-partisan and trusted as you can get. They don’t run psyops programs, they provide massive piles of free and valuable scientific data to the public every day. They devise sophisticated weather models and run supercomputers. I think they probably know how to use an API.
guess tsunami alerts on the platform just weren't worth that much to him
It seems neither do they.
So it's not a totally crazy question to ask if a government agency should have to pay a fee to use a private service like Twitter.
Presumably the government agency would have to do a cost/benefit analysis on running their own service versus paying to outsource it.
It was incredibly easy to share & relay things quickly.
Nothing else in my view comes close. Twitter had won Metcalfe's Law.
Metcalfe's law states that the value or impact of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system.
There's places like Facebook where there's lots of users but most only connect to people they know. Blogs and email can connect people who don't K ow each other, but they have to go make the connection. Twitter has an open culture, where people reshare things, or people converse in threads, & we see those cool things & follow those other people. Twitter was the only successful self growing system on the planet.
Now the connections are all being severed & the network is dying. Such a fucking sad shame pity. This is a burning of the Library of Alexandria of our age. Also no one can afford to look into the archive anymore either so truly some dark Dark Ages shit. Absolutely tragic & monstrous, just vile villianshit.
These social media companies aren't Public services, nor have they been deemed critical enough to be required to provide the same facilities as traditionally regulated communication channels.
Why would they _not_ publish alerts on a communication channel that millions of people demonstrably check frequently?
This is a genuine question: do you get this information from their VHF band reporting? or check their website regularly? or their RSS feeds? moreover even if you do, do you think those are likely to more frequently used/checked (or even available) by people than twitter, Facebook, etc?
Make your own platform if you want to distribute information. Don't expect to be able to exploit others for free forever.
The new cash-desperate Twitter instead wanted to squeeze a few bucks from them, and lost a high profile user and became less useful to remaining Twitter customers.
They made use of a functionality that was willingly made available for free. That changed, so they are stopping to use it.
They made no financial profit, but offered a public service of great utility, for a marginal cost to Twitter that is practically zero. In return, it made Twitter's platform more useful. Everyone benefits. It baffles me to see this called "exploitation".
Why is this the hill you want to die on? Tsunami warnings are unequivocally a public good.
[1] https://www.tsunami.gov/?page=productRetrieval
They were additionally doing Twitter, not exclusively.
All you need for a twitter feed to be valuable is some number of people who use twitter, but don't listen to the radio, don't regularly check the NWS rss feed, don't have hardware to receive the wireless alert system signals, etc. If there is such a group of twitter users then there's a group of people who can now receive alerts that would not otherwise be available.
It seems to be that's what they've done. So I'm not sure what your problem is? Why should the government be paying twitter to provide a service to twitter?