Comment by gloosx
16 hours ago
If you dont mind, could you share an example of information posted exclusively on twitter which was crucial to you? Just curious;)
16 hours ago
If you dont mind, could you share an example of information posted exclusively on twitter which was crucial to you? Just curious;)
Paris' subway and local train lines each have a Twitter account, and they are the only reliable source of information regarding outages. Phone apps (at least three official ones with different data sources!) and websites can be outdated. Displays in station too (though less often), have outages of their own, and (rarely) even incorrect updates.
It almost seems like we need laws that information about public services have to be available on a public website (as opposed to a third-party website that requires registration).
I personally do not know anyone in real life with a twitter account (although I have one, I have not used it in over 15 years), I wonder how many people just go without this information and are angry that it's (seemingly) not available.
There's no way France have no clause in its law everywhere that can be creatively interpreted to be used for that purpose. But that won't get enforced unless there will be a better option than Twitter that average Paris Metro employees understand; they would not be dumb, but they would not care. Average people today can barely grasp the concept of a password.
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> It almost seems like we need laws that information about public services have to be available on a public website
Won't happen in the US/UK because the governments are in Elon's pockets. Won't happen in the EU because they are incapable of getting anything done.
So unless you're in a jurisdiction other than the above three I wouldn't hold your breath about any laws being passed about this.
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as much as I dislike when people proselytize mastodon, it seems like a very tidy solution to this problem.
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X is a public site. Anyone is free to make an account.
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It's been a while since I've used Twitter, but I thought the tweet ordering was never chronological. Has this changed? You just have to trust that the algorithm will always surface relevant information to the top of the feed?
Doesn't their own Île-de-France Mobilités app have reliable information on outages? Surely it's more reliable than their Twitter account?
It's the one I use the most, but in my experience it's lagging behind the Twitter accounts. It's also noisy because it puts last-minute outages at the same level as minor month-long schedule change (which can't be dismissed), so some lines (eg. line R) are almost always displayed as having issues.
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This app is just garbage. Can't even use it if you are rooted.
For me a website is much more accessible than a phone app in many situations.
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Wow, this is kind of a mess, seems twitter won from usability standpoint here
Twitter was in a great space for those kind of things. They had a big user base, a simple format and a working API, which was free for those kinds of things. Toolbuilders integrated it. No platform took over as clear successor.
Of course such information should be on the operator's website as primary source ...
Twitter won by pulling the rug!
They changed terms against their captive users and forced policy changes to end open publishing and firehose APIs—which the organization had once championed and enshrined.
Except that it doesn't because you need an account to see virtually anything on that N#*i site.
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A few recent examples: https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/currencies/articles/bessen... https://theprint.in/world/us-military-says-it-completed-late... https://www.reuters.com/technology/brad-lightcap-leaving-ope...
It’s still the go-to platform for public figures to broadcast unfortunately, so if you want to verify the original comments you need an alternate frontend or an X account.
Looking at these examples, I can't really see how this information was exclusive to X really:
the currency intervention took place on July 31, during active market hours. It was immediately detected by global trading desks and reported by major news wires like Reuters and Bloomberg as it happened.
When CENTCOM issued the statement regarding the strikes on IRGC targets, the text went live on the official U.S. Central Command Media Portal at the exact same second the automated post hit their X account.
Before anything was posted online, Lightcap sent an official farewell note to the OpenAI team. Once an email is sent to hundreds of tech employees, it was immediately leaked to tech journalists.
It seems, for all three examples, the platform was used merely as a broadcasting service for information that was either already occurring in the public eye or was simultaneously distributed through formal channels.
The competition is between:
- needing to look in several places
- looking in one place
Easy to see why Twitter wins, even when information isn't exclusive, which it often is (I would've suggested video involved in news events, which is often impossible to find elsewhere but easily gathered on Twitter).
Last time my city had a water cutoff due to a broken main, the city hall posted on Twitter (and I think Facebook?) where and when to queue for drinking water sooner and much more often than on any other channels, their own website included.
The NYC subway system now writes, on X, "Customer care has moved to the MTA app, chat with us there 24/7. Get service status, arrival times and more all in one place. Visit MTA.info/apps". The web page with similar data is "MTA.info".
There are MTA data feeds, in General Transit Feed Specification format, for program use. Those are for systems that update maps.
The MTA dumped Twitter/X in 2023 because Twitter/X wanted to charge them for using their API, and the MTA refused. [1] The MTA also said that Twitter/X had too much downtime.
When the MTA first got into social media, the person who took the job demanded a desk in the rail control center, so she could see all the displays and immediately hear about problems. If someone mentioned a problem on Twitter, she'd reply immediately. That was the right idea. Few organizations have the guts to put the control room on social media.
[1] https://www.mta.info/press-release/statement-mta-acting-chie...
They don't use Twitter, but my university exclusively uses Facebook for news and relevant announcements like scholarships, days off due to weather, etc. they won't even use their official webpage but for posting the official calendar...
Both FB and WhatsApp have serious lockin with this sort of thing, far more than X does.
WhatsApp is currently not enshittified enough to be a problem, although they do put an entry in my conversation list to talk to their AI.
Any big information fan out is pretty useful for JP twitter. Like yes, we’ll get notifications for flooding / earthquake and etc., but if you want up to date, on the ground videos and etc. it’s pretty useful. Not even talking about the train line scenarios as other commentators mentioned.
There’s a system that is not replicable unless you have majority of the population on the same social media.
I don't know about crucial, but a recent amber alert went out last week. It contained a bit.ly link to the CHP's Twitter page and I couldn't see the information. I clicked on it because the alert was from my town, but light on the details.
Surely a public post on a CHP website would have gotten the job done better.
The local emergency services uses it as a duplicate method because it's mostly more reliable than any service they can afford to offer... and historically a lot of people were using the site, so sharing helps get things noticed.
In this case it seems that linking to the CHP website would likely crash their web servers. Understandable:)
So allowing projects like Nitter and XCancel must also be understandable, in order for recipients to be able to actually read these messages.
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I don't know if it is still the case, but when I was writing some Wikipedia articles I discovered the British monarchy seemed to use Twitter exclusively for some purposes.
Irish rail posts about train delays exclusively on Twitter
Good one, and a heavily criticised one it seems;) Shame on Irish rail for doing this!