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Even Martial Arts has Twitter, and they only get 1 question in 3 days.

This is curious. What prevents SO and MSO from Tweeting?

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  • 3
    What exactly would you have them to tweet about?
    – Lix
    Nov 8, 2012 at 14:12
  • 1
    @Lix The same thing as all the other SE sites, that is, interesting questions and answers.
    – Kendall Frey
    Nov 8, 2012 at 14:14
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    Stack Overflow currently gets 5.8k questions per day. I don't really think a dedicated twitter account for Stack Overflow would be helpful to anyone. What's there to advertise, everyone knows Stack Overflow.
    – yannis
    Nov 8, 2012 at 14:15
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    @YannisRizos But why not? Almost all the other SE sites do. What's special about SO?
    – Kendall Frey
    Nov 8, 2012 at 14:17
  • There are already several tag-related SO Twitter feeds...let's just say I wouldn't subscribe to any of them. Largely useless IMHO.
    – Bart
    Nov 8, 2012 at 14:17
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    @KendallFrey it will generate too much tweets to be really interesting ...
    – j0k
    Nov 8, 2012 at 14:18
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    I've already told you what's special about SO: 5.8k questions per day. In comparison, the next SE site by questions per day is Mathematics with 280 questions.
    – yannis
    Nov 8, 2012 at 14:19
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    Isn't there some sort of bot for finding and tweeting interesting questions? It's not like there's a rule that it needs to tweet EVERY popular question. Just a few a day.
    – Kendall Frey
    Nov 8, 2012 at 14:20
  • Someone has the @stackoverflow handle and they were never able to procure it, IIRC
    – Ben Brocka
    Nov 8, 2012 at 14:21
  • @BenBrocka stackoverflow isn't the only possibility. For example, Super User's handle is StackSuper_User.
    – Kendall Frey
    Nov 8, 2012 at 14:24
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    @Lix: Downtime would be an appropriate topic
    – Oliver Salzburg
    Nov 8, 2012 at 14:25
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    #jquery #unicorns #waffles
    – user159834
    Nov 8, 2012 at 14:29
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    @OliverSalzburg twitter.com/stackstatus
    – yannis
    Nov 8, 2012 at 15:19
  • 2
    @YannisRizos: Oh that's so last hours news!
    – Oliver Salzburg
    Nov 8, 2012 at 15:26
  • Stack Exchange has a Google+ page. Blog items such as the Data Visualization Contest might gain additional visibility.
    – Jason Sturges
    Nov 9, 2012 at 2:22

1 Answer 1

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Your ideas actually aren't that misplaced. Don't get me wrong, Stack Overflow doesn't need its own Twitter account. In fact, I'd almost venture to say that none of the sites really need their own Twitter accounts. However, having a human Tweeting questions is a good thing that will benefit the community a lot more than a bot will.

Why? Because it's a bot. How many automated Twitter bots would you say you follow? How many are you excited to receive spam from? The fact is, bots just aren't that exciting. Maybe their owners are excited about them, but the actual general population probably is uninterested.

However, if you're a great programmer and have a lot of programmer friends who follow you on Twitter, then when you find and share interesting questions, chances are that will set off your Twitter friends' radar, and chances are they may decide to see what you find interesting. You're a person. People are interesting. Bots are not.

So, in short, we have millions of users who could possibly be Tweeting questions, and this scales much better than a bot. Hope this helps!

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2
  • If you liked "People are interesting. Bots are not." you may also enjoy Does SO need social networking features to improve the experience for expert users?
    – Pops
    Nov 13, 2012 at 16:46
  • Sorry @PopularDemand, I'm actually against adding social networking features on Stack Exchange itself. Let Twitter and Facebook handle that stuff as it's what they do. People do better at what they specialize in, and the same goes for businesses. ;) Thanks for the link though.
    – jmort253
    Nov 14, 2012 at 1:41

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