Simon Willison’s Weblog

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150 items tagged “twitter”

2023

I remember that they [Ev and Biz at Twitter in 2008] very firmly believed spam was a concern, but, “we don’t think it’s ever going to be a real problem because you can choose who you follow.” And this was one of my first moments thinking, “Oh, you sweet summer child.” Because once you have a big enough user base, once you have enough people on a platform, once the likelihood of profit becomes high enough, you’re going to have spammers.

Del Harvey # 22nd November 2023, 4:59 am

When Musk introduced creator payments in July, he splashed rocket fuel over the darkest elements of the platform. These kinds of posts always existed, in no small number, but are now the despicable main event. There’s money to be made. X’s new incentive structure has turned the site into a hive of so-called engagement farming — posts designed with the sole intent to elicit literally any kind of response: laughter, sadness, fear. Or the best one: hate. Hate is what truly juices the numbers.

Dave Lee # 7th October 2023, 3:42 pm

Latest Twitter search results for “as an AI language model” (via) Searching for “as an AI language model” on Twitter reveals hundreds of bot accounts which are clearly being driven by GPT models and have been asked to generate content which occasionally trips the ethical guidelines trained into the OpenAI models.

If Twitter still had an affordable search API someone could do some incredible disinformation research on top of this, looking at which accounts are implicated, what kinds of things they are tweeting about, who they follow and retweet and so-on. # 17th April 2023, 2:28 pm

Analytics: Hacker News v.s. a tweet from Elon Musk

My post Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first” really took off.

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2022

Mastodon is just blogs

And that’s great. It’s also the return of Google Reader!

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It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

Elon Musk laid off about half of Twitter this morning. There are many terrible stories emerging about how this went down, but one that particularly struck me was that he laid off the entire accessibility team. For me this feels like a microcosm of the whole situation. Twitter’s priorities are no longer even remotely aligned with my own.

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The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation, and everyone hates the people who decide how content moderation works. Content moderation is what Twitter makes — it is the thing that defines the user experience.

Nilay Patel # 28th October 2022, 3:45 pm

Welcome to hell, Elon (via) If you only read one thing about the Elon acquisition of Twitter make it this, by Nilay Patel. Outstanding insights into what it actually takes to to run a commercial social media service. # 28th October 2022, 3:16 pm

Twitter pranksters derail GPT-3 bot with newly discovered “prompt injection” hack. I’m quoted in this Ars Technica article about prompt injection and the Remoteli.io Twitter bot. # 16th September 2022, 6:33 pm

Building a Covid sewage Twitter bot (and other weeknotes)

I built a new Twitter bot today: @covidsewage. It tweets a daily screenshot of the latest Covid sewage monitoring data published by Santa Clara county.

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SQLite Happy Hour—a Twitter Spaces conversation about three interesting projects building on SQLite

Yesterday I hosted SQLite Happy Hour. my first conversation using Twitter Spaces. The idea was to dig into three different projects that were doing interesting things on top of SQLite. I think it worked pretty well, and I’m curious to explore this format more in the future.

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@newshomepages (via) Ben Welsh used my shot-scraper tool and GitHub Actions to launch a Twitter bot which tweets screenshots of newspaper homepages on a scheduled basis. Ben says: “The tech is so easy, I was able to pull it off in a couple hours at zero cost. A decade ago I ran a similar project using the cloud resources of the day. [...] It costs thousands of dollars and the screenshots were of much lower quality. Incredible progress!” # 12th March 2022, 7:21 pm

2021

A museum bot (via) Shawn Graham built a Twitter bot, using R, which tweets out random items from the collection at the Canadian Science and Technology Museum—using a Datasette instance that he’s running based on a CSV export of their collections data. # 5th May 2021, 7:09 pm

2020

Reducing search indexing latency to one second. Really detailed dive into the nuts and bolts of Twitter’s latest iteration of search indexing technology, including a great explanation of skip lists. # 26th June 2020, 5:06 pm

How much can you learn from just two columns?

Derek Willis shared an intriguing dataset this morning: a table showing every Twitter account followed by an official GOP congressional Twitter account.

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Weeknotes: Datasette 0.40, various projects, Dogsheep photos

A new release of Datasette, two new projects and progress towards a Dogsheep photos solution.

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2019

twitter-to-sqlite 0.6, with track and follow. I shipped a new release of my twitter-to-sqlite command-line tool this evening. It now includes experimental features for subscribing to the Twitter streaming API: you can track keywords or follow users and matching Tweets will be written to a SQLite database in real-time as they come in through the API. Since Datasette supports mutable databases now you can run Datasette against the database and run queries against the tweets as they are inserted into the tables. # 6th October 2019, 4:54 am

Weeknotes: ONA19, twitter-to-sqlite, datasette-rure

I’ve decided to start writing weeknotes for the duration of my JSK fellowship. Here goes!

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My Twitter thread collecting behind the scenes content about Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. I absolutely loved Spider-Verse, and I’ve been delighted to discover that many of the artists who created the movie are active on Twitter and have been posting all kinds of fascinating material about their creative process. I’ve been collecting examples in this Twitter thread for a couple of months now. They definitely deserved that Oscar. # 25th February 2019, 2:57 pm

2018

Twitter conversation about long-term pre-paid archival storage. I kicked off a conversation on Twitter yesterday about long-time archival storage of web content: “Anyone know of a web hosting provider where I can pay a lump sum of money to host a file at a reliable URL essentially forever? Is this even remotely feasible?”. The thread is really interesting—this is definitely an unsolved problem, and it’s clear that the challenge is more organizational (how do you create an entity that can keep this kind of promise—does it need to be some kind of foundation or trust?) than technical. # 5th November 2018, 6:50 pm

python-twitter/get_access_token.py. Creating an OAuth token for accessing a specific Twitter account is way harder than it needs to be. I was about to write my own command-line script for doing this using PIN-based authentication (where you pop open a browser showing the Twitter login flow, then get a PIN number at the end which you paste back into your script) when I discovered that the python-twitter library already ships with a script to do exactly that. Just run “python get_access_token.py”, paste in your app’s consumer key and secret, follow a link, enter the resulting PIN and the script will spit out the consumer_key / consumer_secret / access_token_key / access_token_secret combo you need to start using the Twitter API. # 28th October 2018, 5:25 pm

How about if, instead of ditching Twitter for Mastodon, we all start blogging and subscribing to each other’s Atom feeds again instead? The original distributed social network could still work pretty well if we actually start using it

@simonw # 18th August 2018, 8:59 pm

If I tweeted a throwaway comment in appreciation for McDonald’s apple pies and some other randos on Twitter happened to also tweet similar thoughts over the last few months, it doesn’t mean by extrapolation that ‘Millennials Can’t Get Enough Of McDonald’s Apple Pies’. 
The Twitter search box is not a polling agency and Twitter doesn’t include everybody’s thoughts on everything. Just some people’s thoughts on some things.

Nick Walker # 28th January 2018, 4:18 pm

Analyzing my Twitter followers with Datasette

I decided to do some ad-hoc analsis of my social network on Twitter this afternoon… and since everything is more fun if you bundle it up into a SQLite database and publish it to the internet I performed the analysis using Datasette.

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2017

Early this year, the U.S. intelligence community named RT and Sputnik as implementing state-sponsored Russian efforts to interfere with and disrupt the 2016 Presidential election, which is not something we want on Twitter.

Twitter PublicPolicy # 26th October 2017, 2:38 pm

2014

Why did Twitter move away from being a single-page application?

Twitter is still a single page application, it’s just built properly now (one result of which is that you can’t easily tell).

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2013

What do Twitter and Gawker think of hash-bangs URLs?

As of December 2013 (and potentially much earlier, I don’t have the exact dates) both Twitter and a Gawker have moved away from hash bang URLs, so my guess is they turned out not to be a good idea.

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How do I put my Twitter picture on my company’s about page so that it automatically updates?

This used to be pretty easy, but Twitter made it a lot harder with their APIv1. You need to do authenticated API calls to access their image API now, which means it’s best to set up a cron job and cache the correct URL.

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How did The Voice implement Twitter voting?

You don’t need full firehouse access to implement this—you can use the statuses/filter API to get a feed of tweets that match a specific hash tag: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api...

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It is posible to send an RSS feed to Twitter geolocalized?

Yes, this is possible using the Twitter API. A competent web programmer should be ale to build this for you in a few hours.

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