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“Me”: The one word journalists should add to Twitter searches

160 points by JacobAldridge 11y ago

robotmlg 11y ago
Thank you for de-clickbaiting the title
- ihuman 11y ago
  Is there any documentation on what a clickbait title? HN has guidelines on what to do when the title starts with a number, but the only line about clickbaiting is kind of generic.[1] Personally, I'm not sure if "I'll know it when I see it" is the best policy for this, as different people have different opinions on what clickbait is. And then we have the problem of people just commenting on the act of editing the title, and not the actually content. That's hypocritical of me to complain about, though. [1] "Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait."
  - Mithaldu 11y ago
    > different people have different opinions on what clickbait is. Not really, there are just people who haven't seen a specific type of trick not used ad nauseam, while others have seen it a thousand times already. "I'll know it when I see it" is sufficient here, since there's a wide variety of them and with enough experience they can be easily recognized. In case you would like to have an easier way to learn it though: Typically clickbait is when the article communicates something (anything, really) that could easily fit in the title itself, but refuses to do so. Advanced users compose titles that specifically pique curiosity in the average person.
  - delecti 11y ago
    I agree that it tends to be a "I'll know it when I see it" type thing, but if the title is as long or longer than it would be by "spoiling the surprise", then it's a good sign that it's clickbait. In this case, the article's title could have included "Me(/my)" and avoided dancing around the issue, so I think it definitely qualifies. It's along similar lines to "Blah blah blah, and you won't believe what happens next."
  - protomyth 11y ago
    If the title asks a question that can be answered in the title, then it is probably a clickbait title. It is generally accompanied by a title with the pronoun "you" (e.g. "you wouldn't guess") or exclamation of surprise at the contents of the article. Here we see a fine example: "The one word journalists should add to Twitter searches that you probably haven’t considered". We have a one word answer "Me" and 'you' in the phrase 'you probably have considered'. The poster did a nice change to get the question answered before you need to read the article.
  - CPLX 11y ago
    It by definition is a slippery concept, since the whole concept of "bait" requires an element of deception. Two quick rules of thumb will take you a long way though. 1) Titles where the reader is referred to in the second person, meaning they have the word "You" in them. 2) Titles that use imprecise emotional/colloquial phrases and speculation instead of the factual crux of the article. Doubly so when the title describes the feeling or consequence that the unstated subject will theoretically inspire.
  - ryandrake 11y ago
    I'm not sure I understand all the rage here against "clickbait" titles. I generally reserve a few down votes for folks that come in simply to comment on whether or not the title qualifies as "clickbait" -- comments like these truly add nothing to the conversation. One of the purposes of a title on the web is to convince you to click on it. Good titles drive traffic. I don't get why we all get so hung up on how titles are written. If you don't like how something is worded, don't click on it.
- vacri 11y ago
  It seems that complaints about 'clickbait titles' is the new 'tell everyone Betteridge's Law' of HN these days...
mintplant 11y ago
Some of the screenshots include the sources' email addresses in the DMs. The author really should have taken a moment to blur them out.
- frandroid 11y ago
  They're not DMs, they're public responses. They should still have removed them though, out of courtesy.
  - mintplant 11y ago
    Ah, you're right. My mistake.
  - windwake12 11y ago
    It would have taken 10 seconds to add a box over the username while he was adding those arrows, given the context of the article, it seems outright irresponsible.
    - vacri 11y ago
      Hardly. He's asking permission to talk to them in the first place, and presumably asked permission to use their names in the article. And the article body mentions them by name. And the article is about how to find them in the first place. You're advocating blurring the names out but then telling readers how to find them very easily (it's the point of the article) - this would justifiably open the author to ridicule.
sjbase 11y ago
I have an interesting dilemma. On one hand, I want to commend you for not using the author's clickbait title. On the other hand, I don't want to give the author more exposure (because of the clickbait title) by increasing this post's comment score. In the end, the first hand won. Thanks! :)
- d0vs 11y ago
  HN should just ban medium.com links.
- JacobAldridge 11y ago
  OP here, Thanks for noticing the linkbait work-around. I thought it was a useful piece, but similarly didn't want to reward the original title.
  - raldi 11y ago
    Well, you get two upvotes from me.
- tgb 11y ago
  And here I was able at the article for spoiling the fun of it's 'guess the search terms' game in the damn title. Nope, it wasn't the author I had to be disappointed with, it was HN's blind adherence to keeping the original title AND removing click bait. A much better title would have been the original or something like "what to include in Twitter search terms".
fenollp 11y ago
This is a really naive search method for a person whose job is to be good at this. It's like watching the Spotlight team going through volumes of data themselves… Isn't Data Journalist a thing already?
- ethanbond 11y ago
  Oh good. Another Data X that we can debate the meaning of for the next couple years.
- jldugger 11y ago
  What's your argument exactly? That they should have used narrower terms until they found an article that was already written?
  - fenollp 11y ago
    They use a syntax-aware search (thus refining for ME, MY, …). I thought (hoped) that journalists among all people would be the best at semantic search. Here the guy is just saying "whoa great dude and next I'll use regexps oh my god woaw". We have word2vec, doc2vec, many cores, … why aren't journalists using the tools they should be using?
    - fudged71 11y ago
      I would read this post if you wrote it... because I don't know what word2vec & doc2vec are and why they are useful. If you write the post maybe someone will be inspired to build a tool for journalists using these algos.
    - matnewton 11y ago
      That's an interesting question - if you read the stories of how Edward Snowden's story came to light, you'll find that his main issue with Glenn Greenwald was to get the guy to use technology properly. Hopefully out of the many tech heads who read HN, one will have the same thought as you and build the tool.
    - 11y ago
gravypod 11y ago
Personally, I don't understand why the people in the first article, that this one is about, were upset that someone of another religion wanted to adhere to their faith. It seems fairly reasonable that, on air planes non-the-less, that you will encounter many cultures that seem strange to you. Why would that aggravate you?
- mr_luc 11y ago
  Possibly because it inconvenienced them: by delaying their flight, or by making them feel social anxiety if they were asked to move or moved away from. Or they may have felt sympathy with others inconvenienced, like the flight crew and passengers. It seems like a pretty natural, human thing to dislike being inconvenienced. I dislike it myself, in fact -- don't you?
  - Cyph0n 11y ago
    But that's something you have to live with, especially when on an airplane. I don't see why someone would make a big deal out of that.
  - gravypod 11y ago
    I've been on a few planes in my life and I can tell you that none of them departed on time. Delays are a thing that go hand and hand with operations as complex as aircraft control and maintenance.
- tronje 11y ago
  I haven't personally experienced something like this, but I can come up with a few reasons. 1) maybe I just don't want to switch seats. Maybe I'm already settled in, maybe I like the fact that it's a window/middle/isle seat, etc. 2) imagine someone refuses to sit next to you, stating the reason as "that person is ugly" or "that person's choice of wardrobe disturbs me". If that happened to me, I'd certainly be offended and might refuse to move out of principle (though personally, I'd rather the flight was on time than make a statement). Those reasons are different from "I can't sit next to a woman", but they also refer to superficial, and frankly, childish, things.
armandososa 11y ago
This is why Twitter is awesome and something entirely different from Facebook. It would be a shame to see it go.
lal00 11y ago
(what is that orange number above the nick? is it related to klout?)
wcdolphin 11y ago
This insight seems like a great opportunity for classification or tagging. I wonder what a stream of tweets which were purely autobiographical would look like.
krazydad 11y ago
> "Imagine what your perfect source would tweet, or what you yourself would tweet in that situation, and search for the words that would probably be in it." This is a technique I used to use a lot more in the days before Google became the dominant search engine, when I was using Lycos, Alta Vista and Yahoo. In those more primitive search engines that were doing something closer to a full-text search, it was important to use the words and verb tenses that were likely to appear in the answer (or target page/tweet), not in the question. So for example, instead of querying "Which museum is the Mona Lisa in?" it was best to query "collection includes the mona lisa" and similar phrases. Needless to say, third generation search engines like Google made this all unnecessary, and hopefully, Twitter will get there too, eventually.
- gue5t 11y ago
  This is still how web searching works. I have no idea why you would think otherwise--at its core Google is still fundamentally an indexing service, and you use indices by figuring out which words may be in the documents you want to read and then finding the documents containing those. Without doing this, it becomes impossible to distinguish documents which are what you want from documents which describe what you want (and which often refer to something behind a paywall or in a private or non-digitized collection).
  - OJFord 11y ago
    > This is still how web searching works. I have no idea > why you would think otherwise I imagine it would be days worth of experiencing success with such 'question searches'.
  - whybroke 11y ago
    I dunno... https://www.google.com/search?q=how+can+i+pirate+movies https://www.google.com/search?q=how+can+i+pirate+movies Seems to have no results about pirate movies.
    - dtparr 11y ago
      Now I can't help but wonder how different the world would be if TPB was only about pirate-movie torrents.
chetanahuja 11y ago
Uhhh.. I think I just found what twitter needs to do to make more revenue. Find a way to charge journalists searching for easy sources to make their deadline.
vanattab 11y ago
In my opinion journalists need to stop using Twitter as a source altogether.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- apozem 11y ago
  Why? Twitter is a fantastic way to find leads and potential sources. You can't and shouldn't cite a tweet from a random person, but you can cite reporting done after finding a source on Twitter.
  - vanattab 11y ago
    >You can't and shouldn't cite a tweet from a random person Except this is exactly what ~90% of the articles that "cite" twitter do.
    - atomwaffel 11y ago
      You have a point, but it's explicitly not what the author did. His screenshots show him replying to each of the tweets, asking to talk to their authors, and he goes on to tell their stories in the article. If anything, this shows how valuable a research tool Twitter can be when used properly.
brianberns 11y ago
Isn't "me" a stop word in most search engines? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_words https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_words.
- skeletonjelly 11y ago
  I think if you put it in quotes like you did, funnily enough, it'll force it to be included
tmostak 11y ago
This is really interesting. A great tool to search geocoded tweets is the MapD Tweetmap http://www.mapd.com/demos/tweetmap http://www.mapd.com/demos/tweetmap (full disclosure, my company). For example, here (http://bit.ly/1KIPSqh http://bit.ly/1KIPSqh) are tweets containing “seat” and “me”.
- chris_wot 11y ago
  Now every arsehole spammer will add the words "I'm OK me my" and when a major accident occurs the mode of transport or disaster related noun to their tweets And this is why we can't have nice things. Twitter doesn't kill spam bots fast enough and Twitter spammers and slimey SEO douchebags crap in their own backyard. No wonder Twitter is going down: between the gamergaters, doxxers, trolls, female hating mysogynists, outraged eavesdroppers, rape loving, NLP wielding pick-up artists, swot-abusers, and vapid, brain-dead, useless celebrities - how does Twitter even exist? It's truly amazing how a medium with only a 140 character limit can a. make money, b. communicate anything really worthwhile, or c. be read by anyone with any serious intent! Several years ago the criticisms were that everyone tweeted about mundane crap and it went down frequently [1], now it's being abandoned because it's no better than swimming in a sewage system [2]. 1. http://youtu.be/b5Ff2X_3P_4 http://youtu.be/b5Ff2X_3P_4 2. http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/02/stephen-fry-quits-twitter-baftas http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/02/stephen-fry-quits-twi...
  - girvo 11y ago
    Do you really think those (abhorrent) kinds of people make up the bulk of Twitter's voice? Because my feed certainly isn't.
    - chris_wot 11y ago
      Yup. Your feed might not be full of spam, but how are you going with searching for specific tweets? And I'm assuming you aren't a female who tweets about feminism or calls out mysogynists and who consequently gets threatened with rape or murder; you're not a woman or defending women who build or critically review games; you aren't being doxxed by gamer gaters; you aren't trying to debate a controversial issue so you aren't getting flamed or trolled; you've never quietly joked about a dongle at a tech conference and not realised you were a little bit too loud and subsequently lost your job when someone tweets your photo instead of confronting you directly or taking it to conference organisers; and lastly, you aren't a teenager being influenced by celebrities encouraging you to buy into a vapid and stupid lifestyle instead of contributing to society in some meaningful way. You live in a nice world if that's the case. Twitter is great for you, but pretty awful for everyone else. Which is great, but let's leave Twitter to this niche market and let everyone else find some other medium that isn't so corrosive for them. People of course don't leave this medium, and it beats me why.

160 points by JacobAldridge 11y ago

robotmlg 11y ago

Thank you for de-clickbaiting the title

ihuman 11y ago
Is there any documentation on what a clickbait title? HN has guidelines on what to do when the title starts with a number, but the only line about clickbaiting is kind of generic.[1] Personally, I'm not sure if "I'll know it when I see it" is the best policy for this, as different people have different opinions on what clickbait is. And then we have the problem of people just commenting on the act of editing the title, and not the actually content. That's hypocritical of me to complain about, though. [1] "Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait."
- Mithaldu 11y ago
  > different people have different opinions on what clickbait is. Not really, there are just people who haven't seen a specific type of trick not used ad nauseam, while others have seen it a thousand times already. "I'll know it when I see it" is sufficient here, since there's a wide variety of them and with enough experience they can be easily recognized. In case you would like to have an easier way to learn it though: Typically clickbait is when the article communicates something (anything, really) that could easily fit in the title itself, but refuses to do so. Advanced users compose titles that specifically pique curiosity in the average person.
- delecti 11y ago
  I agree that it tends to be a "I'll know it when I see it" type thing, but if the title is as long or longer than it would be by "spoiling the surprise", then it's a good sign that it's clickbait. In this case, the article's title could have included "Me(/my)" and avoided dancing around the issue, so I think it definitely qualifies. It's along similar lines to "Blah blah blah, and you won't believe what happens next."
- protomyth 11y ago
  If the title asks a question that can be answered in the title, then it is probably a clickbait title. It is generally accompanied by a title with the pronoun "you" (e.g. "you wouldn't guess") or exclamation of surprise at the contents of the article. Here we see a fine example: "The one word journalists should add to Twitter searches that you probably haven’t considered". We have a one word answer "Me" and 'you' in the phrase 'you probably have considered'. The poster did a nice change to get the question answered before you need to read the article.
- CPLX 11y ago
  It by definition is a slippery concept, since the whole concept of "bait" requires an element of deception. Two quick rules of thumb will take you a long way though. 1) Titles where the reader is referred to in the second person, meaning they have the word "You" in them. 2) Titles that use imprecise emotional/colloquial phrases and speculation instead of the factual crux of the article. Doubly so when the title describes the feeling or consequence that the unstated subject will theoretically inspire.
- ryandrake 11y ago
  I'm not sure I understand all the rage here against "clickbait" titles. I generally reserve a few down votes for folks that come in simply to comment on whether or not the title qualifies as "clickbait" -- comments like these truly add nothing to the conversation. One of the purposes of a title on the web is to convince you to click on it. Good titles drive traffic. I don't get why we all get so hung up on how titles are written. If you don't like how something is worded, don't click on it.
vacri 11y ago
It seems that complaints about 'clickbait titles' is the new 'tell everyone Betteridge's Law' of HN these days...

mintplant 11y ago

Some of the screenshots include the sources' email addresses in the DMs. The author really should have taken a moment to blur them out.

frandroid 11y ago
They're not DMs, they're public responses. They should still have removed them though, out of courtesy.
- mintplant 11y ago
  Ah, you're right. My mistake.
- windwake12 11y ago
  It would have taken 10 seconds to add a box over the username while he was adding those arrows, given the context of the article, it seems outright irresponsible.
  - vacri 11y ago
    Hardly. He's asking permission to talk to them in the first place, and presumably asked permission to use their names in the article. And the article body mentions them by name. And the article is about how to find them in the first place. You're advocating blurring the names out but then telling readers how to find them very easily (it's the point of the article) - this would justifiably open the author to ridicule.

sjbase 11y ago

I have an interesting dilemma. On one hand, I want to commend you for not using the author's clickbait title. On the other hand, I don't want to give the author more exposure (because of the clickbait title) by increasing this post's comment score. In the end, the first hand won. Thanks! :)

d0vs 11y ago
HN should just ban medium.com links.
JacobAldridge 11y ago
OP here, Thanks for noticing the linkbait work-around. I thought it was a useful piece, but similarly didn't want to reward the original title.
- raldi 11y ago
  Well, you get two upvotes from me.
tgb 11y ago
And here I was able at the article for spoiling the fun of it's 'guess the search terms' game in the damn title. Nope, it wasn't the author I had to be disappointed with, it was HN's blind adherence to keeping the original title AND removing click bait. A much better title would have been the original or something like "what to include in Twitter search terms".

fenollp 11y ago

This is a really naive search method for a person whose job is to be good at this. It's like watching the Spotlight team going through volumes of data themselves… Isn't Data Journalist a thing already?

ethanbond 11y ago
Oh good. Another Data X that we can debate the meaning of for the next couple years.
jldugger 11y ago
What's your argument exactly? That they should have used narrower terms until they found an article that was already written?
- fenollp 11y ago
  They use a syntax-aware search (thus refining for ME, MY, …). I thought (hoped) that journalists among all people would be the best at semantic search. Here the guy is just saying "whoa great dude and next I'll use regexps oh my god woaw". We have word2vec, doc2vec, many cores, … why aren't journalists using the tools they should be using?
  - fudged71 11y ago
    I would read this post if you wrote it... because I don't know what word2vec & doc2vec are and why they are useful. If you write the post maybe someone will be inspired to build a tool for journalists using these algos.
  - matnewton 11y ago
    That's an interesting question - if you read the stories of how Edward Snowden's story came to light, you'll find that his main issue with Glenn Greenwald was to get the guy to use technology properly. Hopefully out of the many tech heads who read HN, one will have the same thought as you and build the tool.
  - 11y ago

gravypod 11y ago

Personally, I don't understand why the people in the first article, that this one is about, were upset that someone of another religion wanted to adhere to their faith. It seems fairly reasonable that, on air planes non-the-less, that you will encounter many cultures that seem strange to you. Why would that aggravate you?

mr_luc 11y ago
Possibly because it inconvenienced them: by delaying their flight, or by making them feel social anxiety if they were asked to move or moved away from. Or they may have felt sympathy with others inconvenienced, like the flight crew and passengers. It seems like a pretty natural, human thing to dislike being inconvenienced. I dislike it myself, in fact -- don't you?
- Cyph0n 11y ago
  But that's something you have to live with, especially when on an airplane. I don't see why someone would make a big deal out of that.
- gravypod 11y ago
  I've been on a few planes in my life and I can tell you that none of them departed on time. Delays are a thing that go hand and hand with operations as complex as aircraft control and maintenance.
tronje 11y ago
I haven't personally experienced something like this, but I can come up with a few reasons. 1) maybe I just don't want to switch seats. Maybe I'm already settled in, maybe I like the fact that it's a window/middle/isle seat, etc. 2) imagine someone refuses to sit next to you, stating the reason as "that person is ugly" or "that person's choice of wardrobe disturbs me". If that happened to me, I'd certainly be offended and might refuse to move out of principle (though personally, I'd rather the flight was on time than make a statement). Those reasons are different from "I can't sit next to a woman", but they also refer to superficial, and frankly, childish, things.

armandososa 11y ago

This is why Twitter is awesome and something entirely different from Facebook. It would be a shame to see it go.

lal00 11y ago

(what is that orange number above the nick? is it related to klout?)

wcdolphin 11y ago

This insight seems like a great opportunity for classification or tagging. I wonder what a stream of tweets which were purely autobiographical would look like.

krazydad 11y ago

> "Imagine what your perfect source would tweet, or what you yourself would tweet in that situation, and search for the words that would probably be in it." This is a technique I used to use a lot more in the days before Google became the dominant search engine, when I was using Lycos, Alta Vista and Yahoo. In those more primitive search engines that were doing something closer to a full-text search, it was important to use the words and verb tenses that were likely to appear in the answer (or target page/tweet), not in the question. So for example, instead of querying "Which museum is the Mona Lisa in?" it was best to query "collection includes the mona lisa" and similar phrases. Needless to say, third generation search engines like Google made this all unnecessary, and hopefully, Twitter will get there too, eventually.

gue5t 11y ago
This is still how web searching works. I have no idea why you would think otherwise--at its core Google is still fundamentally an indexing service, and you use indices by figuring out which words may be in the documents you want to read and then finding the documents containing those. Without doing this, it becomes impossible to distinguish documents which are what you want from documents which describe what you want (and which often refer to something behind a paywall or in a private or non-digitized collection).
- OJFord 11y ago
  > This is still how web searching works. I have no idea > why you would think otherwise I imagine it would be days worth of experiencing success with such 'question searches'.
- whybroke 11y ago
  I dunno... https://www.google.com/search?q=how+can+i+pirate+movies https://www.google.com/search?q=how+can+i+pirate+movies Seems to have no results about pirate movies.
  - dtparr 11y ago
    Now I can't help but wonder how different the world would be if TPB was only about pirate-movie torrents.

chetanahuja 11y ago

Uhhh.. I think I just found what twitter needs to do to make more revenue. Find a way to charge journalists searching for easy sources to make their deadline.

vanattab 11y ago

In my opinion journalists need to stop using Twitter as a source altogether.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
apozem 11y ago
Why? Twitter is a fantastic way to find leads and potential sources. You can't and shouldn't cite a tweet from a random person, but you can cite reporting done after finding a source on Twitter.
- vanattab 11y ago
  >You can't and shouldn't cite a tweet from a random person Except this is exactly what ~90% of the articles that "cite" twitter do.
  - atomwaffel 11y ago
    You have a point, but it's explicitly not what the author did. His screenshots show him replying to each of the tweets, asking to talk to their authors, and he goes on to tell their stories in the article. If anything, this shows how valuable a research tool Twitter can be when used properly.

brianberns 11y ago

Isn't "me" a stop word in most search engines? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_words https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_words.

skeletonjelly 11y ago
I think if you put it in quotes like you did, funnily enough, it'll force it to be included

tmostak 11y ago

This is really interesting. A great tool to search geocoded tweets is the MapD Tweetmap http://www.mapd.com/demos/tweetmap http://www.mapd.com/demos/tweetmap (full disclosure, my company). For example, here (http://bit.ly/1KIPSqh http://bit.ly/1KIPSqh) are tweets containing “seat” and “me”.

chris_wot 11y ago
Now every arsehole spammer will add the words "I'm OK me my" and when a major accident occurs the mode of transport or disaster related noun to their tweets And this is why we can't have nice things. Twitter doesn't kill spam bots fast enough and Twitter spammers and slimey SEO douchebags crap in their own backyard. No wonder Twitter is going down: between the gamergaters, doxxers, trolls, female hating mysogynists, outraged eavesdroppers, rape loving, NLP wielding pick-up artists, swot-abusers, and vapid, brain-dead, useless celebrities - how does Twitter even exist? It's truly amazing how a medium with only a 140 character limit can a. make money, b. communicate anything really worthwhile, or c. be read by anyone with any serious intent! Several years ago the criticisms were that everyone tweeted about mundane crap and it went down frequently [1], now it's being abandoned because it's no better than swimming in a sewage system [2]. 1. http://youtu.be/b5Ff2X_3P_4 http://youtu.be/b5Ff2X_3P_4 2. http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/02/stephen-fry-quits-twitter-baftas http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/02/stephen-fry-quits-twi...
- girvo 11y ago
  Do you really think those (abhorrent) kinds of people make up the bulk of Twitter's voice? Because my feed certainly isn't.
  - chris_wot 11y ago
    Yup. Your feed might not be full of spam, but how are you going with searching for specific tweets? And I'm assuming you aren't a female who tweets about feminism or calls out mysogynists and who consequently gets threatened with rape or murder; you're not a woman or defending women who build or critically review games; you aren't being doxxed by gamer gaters; you aren't trying to debate a controversial issue so you aren't getting flamed or trolled; you've never quietly joked about a dongle at a tech conference and not realised you were a little bit too loud and subsequently lost your job when someone tweets your photo instead of confronting you directly or taking it to conference organisers; and lastly, you aren't a teenager being influenced by celebrities encouraging you to buy into a vapid and stupid lifestyle instead of contributing to society in some meaningful way. You live in a nice world if that's the case. Twitter is great for you, but pretty awful for everyone else. Which is great, but let's leave Twitter to this niche market and let everyone else find some other medium that isn't so corrosive for them. People of course don't leave this medium, and it beats me why.