Comment by progval
17 hours ago
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 and websites can be outdated.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.
Surely it shouldn't be to difficult to come up with a sort of plugin-type approach like I've seen in various 'comments' sections on existing websites:
Simply embed the 'update' feed on a page in the existing website and have some kind of admin panel where employees can easily CRUD some updates.
I guess because even this would not be 'free', twitter ends up winning.
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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.
I'm in the UK and tired of basic public services like the railway company posting service updates to X first. I keep a bookmark to the local train company (Northern in my case) on XCancel but while it was down, I was a bit under-informed. The stuff is on their own website, but it seems to appear there after it appears on X, the layout is crap, and there's no way to contact the company other than via X.
A lot of private companies do the same thing - no way to effectively contact them privately, but as soon as you whinge publicly on X they're "on it". Octopus Energy is one of the worst for that.
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I think at best you could propose that public information be available without login.
as much as I dislike when people proselytize mastodon, it seems like a very tidy solution to this problem.
As long as the service provider runs an instance in their infrastructure and allows everybody to read.
That said, RSS seems way simpler.
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X is a public site. Anyone is free to make an account.
I strongly reject that I should be required to create an account in order to read updates about local train service.
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.
Ok thanks for the explanation.
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.
Ok but can you answer my question about reliability?
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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.
Usability for announcers, I meant. Seems it's easier for them to just post on twitter instead of having to deal with whatever interface their internal systems provide
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