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Japan prefectures drift away from posting disaster warnings on X

japantimes.co.jp

31–40 of 55 posts

Re: Japan prefectures drift away from posting disaster warnings on X

#31
post #20
post #5

Um, good? Facebook and Twitter should never have been allowed to become the default for this, anyway . These services should have an always up web page. With an RSS feed. So anybody can connect to it and shove the warnings out however they want.

C'mon. I'm totally into tech etc and even I don't use any RSS based tools. Warning systems need to hook into the platforms people are already using. People aren't going to go out of their way to sign up to an alert that will probably never happen.

The point is that in an alternate reality, in the absence of terrible experiences like Twitter and Reddit controlling what we see with algorithms, RSS tools we have greater personal control of are what we could be/should be using instead.

Re: Japan prefectures drift away from posting disaster warnings on X

#32
post #5

Um, good? Facebook and Twitter should never have been allowed to become the default for this, anyway . These services should have an always up web page. With an RSS feed. So anybody can connect to it and shove the warnings out however they want.

It's difficult for most transit agencies to maintain the sort of uptime that a social media company does. But there should be no login wall on posts from government agencies (grey check).

A third party service who's contracted to do it would be the right move in that case. Operating critical processes through a company with no obligation to provide that service is dumb. The evidence is in the outcome here.

We trust the metro companies to run critical infrastructure for our cities, I am sure they can organise a website.

Re: Japan prefectures drift away from posting disaster warnings on X

#33

I’ve been hoping for a Twitter Japan fork like there was for yahoo!…

Yeah Musk could probably have made back the majority of his investment just selling Twitter Japan to SoftBank. He only seems to be interested in the US anyway

Re: Japan prefectures drift away from posting disaster warnings on X

#34

I’ve been hoping for a Twitter Japan fork like there was for yahoo!…

Yeah Musk could probably have made back the majority of his investment just selling Twitter Japan to SoftBank. He only seems to be interested in the US anyway

That's what I was hoping for as well -- Twitter for Japan (with the Twitter brand) run by someone other than Elon Musk, and Elon Musk can keep his X.

Re: Japan prefectures drift away from posting disaster warnings on X

#35
post #15

Personally I found the shuffles with the API a huge pain. I have a small bot and I previously just used a command line client to post my automated tweets. With the API changes and new keys those clients all stopped working and the maintainers were uninterested in fixing them. So now I have to implement oauth myself. Which as a busy person and poor programmer is a significant amount of work. I went with paying IFTT a…

> Personally I found the shuffles with the API a huge pain. Why is it when Apple does this nearly every year right on schedule, they're lauded as stewards of progress?

Because when Apple does something to annoy or inconvenience existing users, it at least benefits Apple. They are pursuing what they see as rational self-interest.

What's happening at Twitter benefits nobody including the person who's giving the orders. It's completely inscrutable.

Re: Japan prefectures drift away from posting disaster warnings on X

#36
post #20
post #5

Um, good? Facebook and Twitter should never have been allowed to become the default for this, anyway . These services should have an always up web page. With an RSS feed. So anybody can connect to it and shove the warnings out however they want.

C'mon. I'm totally into tech etc and even I don't use any RSS based tools. Warning systems need to hook into the platforms people are already using. People aren't going to go out of their way to sign up to an alert that will probably never happen.

C'mon. I'm totally into tech etc. and even I never use Twitter (er, "X") at all, and never have.

Who actually uses Twitter? No one I know.

Re: Japan prefectures drift away from posting disaster warnings on X

#37
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For consumers maybe? But for official government dissemination of information? This is the topic of discussion. Try doing anything remotely "official" in Japan without fax or a paper process with half a dozen ink stamps. It can't be done.

Fax usage in Japan is often exaggerated. Paper and stamp process is the real.

Lots of American businesses still use fax, especially law offices and real estate offices.

Re: Japan prefectures drift away from posting disaster warnings on X

#38
post #21

Hadnt realised Twitter put in place limits like that. So literally they are blocking their power users, the ones who make the most content for other users.

> So literally they are blocking their power users, the ones who make the most content for other users.

AND they've made changes to their site which have rendered it impractical to use as a public "status page" -- for logged-out visitors, posts on an account's profile page are ordered by the number of likes, not chronologically, and pages for individual posts don't display replies.

Take a look at what this does to the National Weather Service's page, for example [1]. What's on top? Posts from years ago warning about hurricanes that have long since passed. They're still making posts about active weather threats, but there's no way to see them if you aren't logged in -- so it's no longer an effective way to reach the public at large. Nor does it help that their widget for embedding a Twitter feed on a web site has been broken for over a month [2]!

[1]: https://twitter.com/NWS

[2]: https://twittercommunity.com/t/embedded-tweets-not-working/1...

Re: Japan prefectures drift away from posting disaster warnings on X

#39
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C'mon. I'm totally into tech etc and even I don't use any RSS based tools. Warning systems need to hook into the platforms people are already using. People aren't going to go out of their way to sign up to an alert that will probably never happen.

I don't think there's any country where most people use Twitter at all , much less use it often enough that they would incidentally see an emergency alert from their local government.

That's an argument against using it as the sole means of communication, which no one has proposed.

Re: Japan prefectures drift away from posting disaster warnings on X

#40
post #31
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C'mon. I'm totally into tech etc and even I don't use any RSS based tools. Warning systems need to hook into the platforms people are already using. People aren't going to go out of their way to sign up to an alert that will probably never happen.

The point is that in an alternate reality, in the absence of terrible experiences like Twitter and Reddit controlling what we see with algorithms, RSS tools we have greater personal control of are what we could be/should be using instead.

Assuming you trust whoever is providing the feed to not filter it, and to maintain it forever.
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