6 ms·

This account can no longer post all Tsunami Warnings, Advisories, Watches

104 points by davidgerard 4y ago

DoctorOW 4y ago
I'm aware it's currently pinned on this profile, but is there a reason we couldn't use the permalink? https://twitter.com/NWS_NTWC/status/1647040102475128832 https://twitter.com/NWS_NTWC/status/1647040102475128832
- rawling 4y ago
  As a positive, everyone who clicks the submission can now see that this has been fixed.
lapcat 4y ago
The government should use open technologies such as email, RSS, and Mastodon. Apparently 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 https://tsunami.gov/events/xml/PAAQAtom.xml
- rektide 4y ago
  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.
  - rsync 4y ago
    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.
    - rektide 4y ago
      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.
  - flangola7 4y ago
    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.
    - rektide 4y ago
      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.
    - TRiG_Ireland 4y ago
      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).
      - TRiG_Ireland 4y ago
        (It's called Tootfinder, if you want to use it.)
    - rchaud 4y ago
      I am using the Tusky Android client for Mastodon and can search by post, account or hash tag. Is there more to it?
  - version_five 4y ago
    > The loss here is immense. 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.
    - olliej 4y ago
      > 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.
    - rektide 4y ago
      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.
  - xtracto 4y ago
    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.
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      > 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Alert_System
- helsinkiandrew 4y ago
  > 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.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- falcolas 4y ago
  For things like tsunami warnings, they should post them where the people are. At least for now, people are on Twitter. And, being blunt, effectively 0% of the global population uses RSS for news. Especially time sensitive news.
Proven 4y ago
[dead]
none_to_remain 4y ago
How much $$$ are they cheaping out on?
d23 4y ago
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.
- mindslight 4y ago
  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.
qtzfz 4y ago
They only post once every one-two days, so they are not getting throttled. The limit was several tweets an hour. So I call BS
- JaimeThompson 4y ago
  In the event of a Tsunami I would expect them to post a great many times per hour.
- firstlink 4y ago
  Indeed, this is obvious retaliation for the NPR thing.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- cldellow 4y ago
  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.
- pimlottc 4y ago
  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.
1970-01-01 4y ago
... because they are on the free tier and don't want to pay $100/month to have this feature. There's the truth, and there's the whole truth.
- eh9 4y ago
  … 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.
- ImPostingOnHN 4y ago
  if elmu doesn't want them posting on twitter, it's his call, no reason they should pay when they're the one providing a service to him (relevancy) guess tsunami alerts on the platform just weren't worth that much to him
- youngNed 4y ago
  you think government agencies should be paying for this? It seems neither do they.
- presto8 4y ago
  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.
- olliej 4y ago
  Why should twitter not be paying the government for information that lets them inform their users of emergencies?
c7DJTLrn 4y ago
Why is Twitter the appropriate way to distribute this information?
- fleetwoodsnack 4y ago
  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.
- rektide 4y ago
  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.
- renewedrebecca 4y ago
  Because until a gormless billionaire wrecked it, it worked well for this function.
- Zetobal 4y ago
  It's another channel and the more channels available the more they use. Which is the appropriate way to distribute such informations.
- spaceprison 4y ago
  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.
Ekaros 4y ago
And why should they get to leverage private platform for free? I see no reason for any business or governmental agency to have that opportunity. Make your own platform if you want to distribute information. Don't expect to be able to exploit others for free forever.
- pornel 4y ago
  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.
- dxdm 4y ago
  > exploit others for free for ever 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".
- regularjack 4y ago
  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.
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    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.
    - Jcowell 4y ago
      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.
anonuser123456 4y ago
Probably for the best. People shouldn’t depend on ad tech for safety critical services.
worstestes 4y ago
FYI, API access has been re-established after discussions with Twiiter

104 points by davidgerard 4y ago

I'm aware it's currently pinned on this profile, but is there a reason we couldn't use the permalink? https://twitter.com/NWS_NTWC/status/1647040102475128832 https://twitter.com/NWS_NTWC/status/1647040102475128832

rawling 4y ago
As a positive, everyone who clicks the submission can now see that this has been fixed.

lapcat 4y ago

The government should use open technologies such as email, RSS, and Mastodon. Apparently 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 https://tsunami.gov/events/xml/PAAQAtom.xml

rektide 4y ago
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.
- rsync 4y ago
  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.
  - rektide 4y ago
    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.
- flangola7 4y ago
  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.
  - rektide 4y ago
    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.
  - TRiG_Ireland 4y ago
    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).
    - TRiG_Ireland 4y ago
      (It's called Tootfinder, if you want to use it.)
  - rchaud 4y ago
    I am using the Tusky Android client for Mastodon and can search by post, account or hash tag. Is there more to it?
- version_five 4y ago
  > The loss here is immense. 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.
  - olliej 4y ago
    > 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.
  - rektide 4y ago
    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.
- xtracto 4y ago
  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.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Alert_System
helsinkiandrew 4y ago
> 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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
falcolas 4y ago
For things like tsunami warnings, they should post them where the people are. At least for now, people are on Twitter. And, being blunt, effectively 0% of the global population uses RSS for news. Especially time sensitive news.

Proven 4y ago

[dead]

none_to_remain 4y ago

How much $$$ are they cheaping out on?

d23 4y ago

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.

mindslight 4y ago
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.

qtzfz 4y ago

They only post once every one-two days, so they are not getting throttled. The limit was several tweets an hour. So I call BS

JaimeThompson 4y ago
In the event of a Tsunami I would expect them to post a great many times per hour.
firstlink 4y ago
Indeed, this is obvious retaliation for the NPR thing.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
cldellow 4y ago
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.
pimlottc 4y ago
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.

1970-01-01 4y ago

... because they are on the free tier and don't want to pay $100/month to have this feature. There's the truth, and there's the whole truth.

eh9 4y ago
… 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.
ImPostingOnHN 4y ago
if elmu doesn't want them posting on twitter, it's his call, no reason they should pay when they're the one providing a service to him (relevancy) guess tsunami alerts on the platform just weren't worth that much to him
youngNed 4y ago
you think government agencies should be paying for this? It seems neither do they.
presto8 4y ago
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.
olliej 4y ago
Why should twitter not be paying the government for information that lets them inform their users of emergencies?

c7DJTLrn 4y ago

Why is Twitter the appropriate way to distribute this information?

fleetwoodsnack 4y ago
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.
rektide 4y ago
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.
renewedrebecca 4y ago
Because until a gormless billionaire wrecked it, it worked well for this function.
Zetobal 4y ago
It's another channel and the more channels available the more they use. Which is the appropriate way to distribute such informations.
spaceprison 4y ago
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.

Ekaros 4y ago

And why should they get to leverage private platform for free? I see no reason for any business or governmental agency to have that opportunity. Make your own platform if you want to distribute information. Don't expect to be able to exploit others for free forever.

pornel 4y ago
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.
dxdm 4y ago
> exploit others for free for ever 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".
regularjack 4y ago
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.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  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.
  - Jcowell 4y ago
    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.

anonuser123456 4y ago

Probably for the best. People shouldn’t depend on ad tech for safety critical services.

worstestes 4y ago

FYI, API access has been re-established after discussions with Twiiter