Maximize your tweet's chance of discovery via hashtags • Hacker News Board

Re: Maximize your tweet's chance of discovery via hashtags

#11

Post by ballard » Tue, Mar 25, 2014, 12:44 PM UTC

martco wrote: post #7

JacobAldridge wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My thought (as a non techie) is that it's just easier to ask for everything. Need to use an open source library in building your codebase? No need to analyse everything to see which permissions it does or doesn't impinge upon. Want to add a new feature down the track? No need to consider whether it changes the user permissions. And I'd be surprised how many people are turned off by the number of permissions - I'll al…

My thought (as a developer) is that it's just lazier (and worse for the product) to ask for everything. The more permissions you ask for, the less users you'll get. For example, Facebook blatantly recommends that app developers ask for only the bare minimum of permissions on the initial app engagement. They cite numbers showing that click-through rate falls off precipitously once users see more than a few permissions…

Yup. I think OAuth calls it scope, and it's a list of requested permissions.

Re: Maximize your tweet's chance of discovery via hashtags

#12

Post by ballard » Tue, Mar 25, 2014, 12:46 PM UTC

Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #9

onion2k wrote: post #2

Do people actually watch hashtags that aren't event specific?

My thoughts exactly. They always look a bit #desperate #tryingtoohard #inauthentic PLEASE RT!!!

That would be a funny contest: most desperate tweet.

Re: Maximize your tweet's chance of discovery via hashtags

#13

Post by level09 » Tue, Mar 25, 2014, 1:15 PM UTC

I played with twitter bots before, and I tried different ways to maximize the exposure of my "automated" tweets, sometimes by parsing dictionary words, other times by targeting trending hashtags, but that didn't seem to generate much traffic.

I would be really interested in any statistics regarding the effect of hashtags, or statistics about users who actually browse/search through hashtags.

Re: Maximize your tweet's chance of discovery via hashtags

#14

Post by 1wheel » Tue, Mar 25, 2014, 1:51 PM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #2

Do people actually watch hashtags that aren't event specific?

I scroll through #d3js every few days to see what's being made/talked about.

Re: Maximize your tweet's chance of discovery via hashtags

#15

Post by maintopbiz » Tue, Mar 25, 2014, 2:06 PM UTC

oskarth wrote: post #3

This is a cool idea, but can someone explain why this requires the following Twitter permissions? - Update your profile. - Post Tweets for you. - Access your direct messages. In general I'm at loss why so many apps require so many permissions. They must lose a ton of customers from this. Anyone care to explain? Is it just a spam app meant to create a botnet or what?

Hi, I am a co-founder of RiteTag. Don't worry we are not any spam bot. But unfurtunately, Twitter has only 3 types of permissions:

1) Read 2) Write 3) Direct messages

We cannot go only for Read because we need to allow users to sent and schedule tweets via RiteTag. But we do not send anything that user hasn't manually approved.

Write permission goes automatically with Update your profile even though we don't use it at all. As developers, we cannot select only Posting tweets. That's Twitter's policy. It doesn't make sense for us either.

Lastly, we were playing with direct messages a year ago. We don't need them now and we could turn them off. But in the meantime we got more than 7000 users and if we change the permissions RiteTag would stop working for them until they re-authorize it. This means all the tweets they have scheduled would not be sent.

Here is more info from Twitter, if you are interested: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/application-permission-model

Re: Maximize your tweet's chance of discovery via hashtags

#16

Post by Jakehp » Tue, Mar 25, 2014, 2:07 PM UTC

oskarth wrote: post #3

This is a cool idea, but can someone explain why this requires the following Twitter permissions? - Update your profile. - Post Tweets for you. - Access your direct messages. In general I'm at loss why so many apps require so many permissions. They must lose a ton of customers from this. Anyone care to explain? Is it just a spam app meant to create a botnet or what?

After I saw "Access your direct messages." I cancelled my signup & uninstalled the browser extension. That permission is a bit too steep for me.

Re: Maximize your tweet's chance of discovery via hashtags

#17

Post by maintopbiz » Tue, Mar 25, 2014, 2:17 PM UTC

Jakehp wrote: post #16

oskarth wrote: post #3

This is a cool idea, but can someone explain why this requires the following Twitter permissions? - Update your profile. - Post Tweets for you. - Access your direct messages. In general I'm at loss why so many apps require so many permissions. They must lose a ton of customers from this. Anyone care to explain? Is it just a spam app meant to create a botnet or what?

After I saw "Access your direct messages." I cancelled my signup & uninstalled the browser extension. That permission is a bit too steep for me.

Sorry to hear that. We don't really use this permission at all. See my explanation above.

Re: Maximize your tweet's chance of discovery via hashtags

#18

Post by maintopbiz » Tue, Mar 25, 2014, 2:19 PM UTC

ballard wrote: post #10

Wow cool! Would really like to see related tags, built in the usual big data algorithms / search UX way.

We'll soon release an API if someone wants to play with hashtags ;-) http://ritetag.com/rest-api

Re: Maximize your tweet's chance of discovery via hashtags

#19

Post by minimaxir » Tue, Mar 25, 2014, 2:21 PM UTC

level09 wrote: post #13

I played with twitter bots before, and I tried different ways to maximize the exposure of my "automated" tweets, sometimes by parsing dictionary words, other times by targeting trending hashtags, but that didn't seem to generate much traffic. I would be really interested in any statistics regarding the effect of hashtags, or statistics about users who actually browse/search through hashtags.

I submitted a post yesterday I wrote about using statistical analysis on Instagram hashtags: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7458540

The key takeaway is that there's a lot of variance in the amount of engagement even after optimizing your hashtags. Twitter would be worse since there's an implicit hashtag cap.

Re: Maximize your tweet's chance of discovery via hashtags

#20

Post by oskarth » Tue, Mar 25, 2014, 2:37 PM UTC

maintopbiz wrote: post #15

oskarth wrote: post #3

This is a cool idea, but can someone explain why this requires the following Twitter permissions? - Update your profile. - Post Tweets for you. - Access your direct messages. In general I'm at loss why so many apps require so many permissions. They must lose a ton of customers from this. Anyone care to explain? Is it just a spam app meant to create a botnet or what?

Hi, I am a co-founder of RiteTag. Don't worry we are not any spam bot. But unfurtunately, Twitter has only 3 types of permissions: 1) Read 2) Write 3) Direct messages We cannot go only for Read because we need to allow users to sent and schedule tweets via RiteTag. But we do not send anything that user hasn't manually approved. Write permission goes automatically with Update your profile even though we don't use it a…

Thank you for your detailed response. I understand that there are technical limitations when it comes to permission, but it still makes me uneasy when I have to give that many permissions to a new app. Maybe it's the granularity at Twitter that is wrong and should be changed, but if there's any way you can ease down on the permissions I think that would be appreciated by many users.