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Like the title says: Should site-specific feeds be tweeting meta questions?

I say no. It doesn't serve much of a purpose, to be honest.

The twitterbot tends to tweet crap in general, but lets assume that it didn't for a second. It would be more worthwhile to tweet something sysadmin related from the main site than a request to blackhole a tag from meta.

If you feel that there is value to having meta posts tweeted, then I think there should be separate twitterbots/accounts for mains and metas.

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    (屮ﾟДﾟ)屮 Y U NO LIKE MY POSTS!!!
    – Wesley
    Jan 5, 2012 at 21:11
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    @WesleyDavid I know that you're a cat, but please try and keep up with your English language skills. Your post is OK. The SF twitter feed tweeting about it is weird.
    – MDMarra
    Jan 5, 2012 at 21:12
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    s/weird/wrong/ <
    – user147520
    Jan 5, 2012 at 21:13
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    We need to commandeer the ServerFault Twitter account.
    – Wesley
    Jan 5, 2012 at 21:14
  • 4
    Does this answer your question? Why do site meta questions get posted on Twitter?
    – user313042
    Jun 25, 2020 at 2:25

5 Answers 5

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NO

No, it should not. What value does this possibly add to the site, to twitter, or anything?

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14

For what it's worth I agree with the box (No.)
I don't think new people would be interested in our governance/moderation/tagging/migration/etc. discussions.

The Box Says No

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  • (I really did look for a smaller version of that image - Anyone know how to resize markdown images?)
    – voretaq7
    Jan 5, 2012 at 21:17
  • @voretaq7 - If your browser supports CSS (and it should....), the image should be automatically resized. Otherwise, you can download the image to your computer, resize it there, and upload the resized version.
    – Kevin Vermeer
    Jan 5, 2012 at 21:46
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    @KevinVermeer It resized to fit within the answers column, but that took up a huge swath of vertical space in my particular configuration. I gave up and HTMLized the image to make it a reasonable size (I'm far too lazy to do resizing on my desktop :P).
    – voretaq7
    Jan 5, 2012 at 21:52
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The box is, without question, right in all things including this. This is simply another reflection of the quality of the TweetBot AI. One can only assume it was created by Hastur for punishment.

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    Although I agree that the tweetbot for Stack Exchange can use some work, it seems that tweeting from a site's meta had to have been a conscious design decision. Quality of question selection aside, I think that tweeting from metas should go.
    – MDMarra
    Jan 5, 2012 at 21:20
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    meh, I don't blame the algorithm for this (everything else is it's fault though) -- Metas should just be excluded from the selection candidates. That should be an "easy" fix, and the more tedious "how to design a good tweeting algorithm" stuff can be dealt with later...
    – voretaq7
    Jan 5, 2012 at 21:20
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I agree with the comments on previous answers that the main site and meta have two different purposes. It may be useful to send out Tweets for both, but the tweets should not be mingled in the same Twitter stream.

Tweets from the main sites are public-facing: they are intended to draw users to the site to answer the question if they have an answer, or to read the answers if they need an answer to a similar question. My question is, who is the intended audience for these tweets? Are they only for people already participating on Stack Exchange, or are they intended to draw new users to the site?

Tweets from Meta are public town-hall meetings, but even within that sphere, there are different types of meetings. Cities can have regular bread-and-butter sessions, which are of little interest to anyone not a policy wonk, unless there happens to be an issue on the agenda which directly impacts you. Contrast these with Public Hearings, special issues where input from the Public is solicited on that general topic.

I think it would be useful to separate these Twitter streams, so that those who chose to follow the sites on Twitter could choose which kind of Tweets they wanted to get.

Ideally the only kinds of Meta posts I would like to see included in the main site's Twitter are the public-facing ones, like announcements of events (Weekly Chats and other events, Weekly Topic Challenges, and the like). These could be selected by means of a tag like .

I understand the argument of Tweeting the everyday Meta content for those who are already on the site, but I would like to see Meta sites on a separate account, so that the people who want to keep up with the site via Twitter chould choose to read it.

We don't mingle Meta posts with the posts on the main sites -- we have separate areas. There are all sorts of good reasons why not -- and IMO those reasons apply to the Twitter feeds as well.

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Sure, this was a specific decision to tweet meta questions, and we had/have reasons for it. Not everyone is on the meta site as much as the main site. The meta site is your community's town hall, the governance. Meta questions, thus governance of this site by the community, could always use more attention. A casual user of the main site may not be aware of what is happening on the meta site, yet posts absolutely affect them. Meta discussions being fair game for tweeting is very much for these reasons.

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    I think that there are probably better ways to achieve visibility of meta than by tweeting random things from there in the main site's feed. I understand the point of the twitter feeds to mainly be advertisements of interesting topics from the sites. Mixing meta with this seems like it would do nothing except confuse potential new users. Not to mention that the SE twitterbot somehow manages to compile a collection of the worst crap on the site (but that's neither here nor there).
    – MDMarra
    Jan 6, 2012 at 18:33
  • The algorithm is not random.
    – Rebecca Chernoff
    Jan 6, 2012 at 18:34
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    Sadly, it might as well be.
    – user147520
    Jan 6, 2012 at 18:35
  • Perhaps I should have said "seemingly random". I do know that there is an awful lot of chat lately about how bad the things that get tweeted are.
    – MDMarra
    Jan 6, 2012 at 18:35
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    But Town Hall discussions aren't published on the front page of the visitor's bureau magazine. Twitter is a medium for public-facing discussion, not internal matters.
    – Wesley
    Jan 6, 2012 at 18:46
  • @WesleyDavid meta posts are public to the entire site community, wouldn't really call them internal.
    – Rebecca Chernoff
    Jan 6, 2012 at 19:04
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    @RebeccaChernoff They're public, yes. Just like town hall meetings and city council meetings are public, but you don't really want or need those things being publi- cized to the general populace. Looks messy and doesn't promote what the sites are about. Doesn't promote what is the intended draw of the sites.
    – Wesley
    Jan 6, 2012 at 19:09
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    I'm all for getting meta topics more attention, but to extend the town hall analogy what we really want are the town residents to come to those meetings and pay attention. To me the Twitter feed is like walking down main street and looking in shop windows for something interesting -- putting Meta stuff in there is like having a billboard with meeting minutes in the middle of Main Street: Just Plain Weird.
    – voretaq7
    Jan 6, 2012 at 23:32

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