The other day, another moderator and I were tossing around the idea of having an unofficial site Twitter account. Stack Exchange stopped making them a few years ago for various reasons, but we could still have an independent, community-run account, which would tweet out particularly interesting questions from the main site, as well as blog posts, special events (like the holiday Bountapalooza), and anything else worldbuilders might find interesting. It would be a great way to increase our site's visibility (and it turns out we might be more visible than anyone expected!).
Mi Yodeya (@mi_yodeya) and Literature (@StackLiterature) already have this sort of unofficial account. As I understand it, while a few users have explicit access to the account, they also use a service called dlvr.it, which treats starred messages (one-boxed questions) in a chat room as an RSS feed, and tweets those, in addition to manual tweets (I hope people will correct me if I'm wrong about the details).
I see us having a similar setup: maybe 3-4 people having access to the login credentials (ideally including at least one mod), as well as some sort of chat room for folks to submit possible questions to be tweeted. We could either enable the RSS feed model or allow those 3-4 users to choose from submissions. Perhaps we could also add an RSS feed from Universe Factory.
Some notes:
- As with the blog, we'd have to make it clear that the account is not operated by Stack Exchange; it's an independent venture. This impacts things like the name and handle, as we shouldn't use something like @stackWorldbuilding or @WorldbuildingStackExchange.
- I'd want to keep the tweets pretty narrow in scope, and I'd maybe even consider asking that we not reply to other tweets, to reduce the chances of . . . potential problems. In other words, I'd prefer that, at least for now, it act like an RSS feed, but awesomer.
- We do need to ensure that we put a filter on what we tweet. We need to be mindful that, like the Hot Network Questions list, question titles will be appearing largely without context, and we do, from time to time, get titles that seem not great without context. This makes me want to ensure some manual oversight of tweets, to prevent problems - at least in the early stages.
- We get a lot of our traffic from inside the Stack Exchange network, as expected. It's a phenomenon we've been noticing for years and years. This could help us reach the larger world building community out there.
Finally, as I write this, I notice that we had this same discussion almost three years ago. It had pretty strong support, but it never went anywhere. I'm curious if people feel the same way now.
Thoughts? Ideas? Concerns?