14

This question made it into Hot Network Questions, but was removed by a moderator later. Six hours after the removal, it was tweeted onto the site's Twitter account, drawing it more attention.

In my view, the whole purpose of removing the question was to reduce the amount of attention it was getting. However, the subsequent tweet resulted in it getting more attention that moderators clearly didn't want happening. The tweet essentially nullified the moderator's opinion.

Can we please make it so that if a question is removed from Hot Network Questions, it will also prevent the question from being tweeted?

While we're at it, it would also be nice to give moderators more control into the site's Twitter account, such as allowing them to delete tweets (the equivalent of removing from Hot Network Questions).

Improve this question
13
  • 17
    might be easier to just remove all the remaining Twitter bots entirely, they don't serve any useful purpose anyway. The only tweets that should happen are manually curated ones, the automatic ones are simply not useful enough
    – Mad Scientist
    Commented Feb 17, 2020 at 23:07
  • 2
    @MadScientist you do realize there's an unfollow button? You don't have to follow SE's tweets if you don't want to.
    – JJJ
    Commented Feb 18, 2020 at 0:09
  • 7
    @JJforPopcornandMonica I doubt folks are concerned with being exposed to the tweets themselves; rather, questions are usually removed from the HNQ because the type of attention they draw from outside the community of that SE site is damaging. For the same reason, drawing attention from the broader twitter community seems counterproductive.
    – Bryan Krause
    Commented Feb 18, 2020 at 2:23
  • 2
    @BryanKrause There could be various reasons for questions being removed from the HNQ. For example with sites such as Math SE which use MathJax, since titles with this are not rendered properly in the HNQ, if a title has MathJax (including if it was added after becoming a HNQ), the question could be removed for that reason. With the particular question the OP linked to, the title was edited to change "3" to "$3$", i.e., use MathJax, on Feb. 13 at 6:23, and the question was removed about a half hour later at 6:57, with I suspect the MathJax in the title being at least part of the reason why.
    – John Omielan
    Commented Feb 18, 2020 at 4:52
  • 1
    @JohnOmielan I don't know the stats but I suspect bad mathjax is a rare reason. If that's the issue, it seems easily solvable with an edit rather than HNQ removal.
    – Bryan Krause
    Commented Feb 18, 2020 at 4:58
  • 2
    @BryanKrause The issue is not "bad" MathJax, but any MathJax at all. For example, this answer says "if you are able to make a reasonable title for your question which contains MathJax and if you edit the title in this way, that would remove the question the list". Also, it links to Do questions with LaTeX in titles appear in Hot Questions? which has more relevant details. Since most questions on Math SE use MathJax, later if not initially, it's a major issue with HNQ on that site.
    – John Omielan
    Commented Feb 18, 2020 at 5:04
  • @JohnOmielan Okay but maybe like...address that on your site then? The way you are stating it here, which again is about a site I know nothing about, it sounds like any mathjax in a title is bad mathjax. So an edit that removes it is good (if it makes a more broadly formatted title), and lacking that, a move to omit it from both HNQ and twitter is good. If you want to argue about those points, maybe this comment thread isn't the best place.
    – Bryan Krause
    Commented Feb 18, 2020 at 5:07
  • 3
    @JohnOmielan Questions with any MathJax markup are excluded from HNQ; no manual removal is necessary for that. The manual removal feature is fairly new; before it existed, it was typical for mods there to edit some random MathJax into titles to remove questions from HNQ. This seems like what the mod did there initially. I'm not sure what the later manual removal was for; it could have been either to indicate publicly that it was removed, or they thought their prior attempt didn't go through because caching. However, my point stands that attempts to stop attention shouldn't be subverted.
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Commented Feb 18, 2020 at 6:03
  • 2
    related: Avoid tweeting bad questions
    – gnat
    Commented Feb 27, 2020 at 12:06
  • 4
    So far as I know, we're not planning to dedicate any work to the Twitter integration right now.
    – Slate StaffMod
    Commented Feb 6, 2023 at 18:37
  • 2
    Actually - its possible all the bots might break with twitter killing off the API too, which would render this moot.
    – Journeyman Geek Mod
    Commented Feb 7, 2023 at 0:51
  • 1
    And no, I would be disappointed in SE if they gave in to twitter's current management's blackmail ._.
    – Journeyman Geek Mod
    Commented Feb 7, 2023 at 0:51
  • 2
    As mentioned above – Due to changes in Twitter's API, these Twitter bots (for the SE sites that had them) have now been shut off. See this post for more details.
    – V2Blast Staff
    Commented Feb 8, 2023 at 21:23

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
7

Thanks for raising this up! Though we marked this as the reason is due is to us stepping away from automatically posting Stack Exchange content to Twitter. Catjia has done a fantastic job of providing more insight into our rationale here. We have deprecated all the code for automatically posting on Twitter.

While this was declined some time ago we appreciate you for being so patient as we fully resolved and responded to this issue.

Improve this answer
2
  • 1
    Technically, you have implemented this, as the fact no posts are tweeted means that posts removed from hnq will no longer be posted.
    – user1937198
    Commented Sep 29, 2023 at 19:30
  • I like the way you think!
    – Emerson StaffMod
    Commented Oct 2, 2023 at 15:07

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .