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As of late yesterday, Stack Exchange has revived its official Twitter account, @StackExchange. It had been used intermittently/actually-not-at-all for several years, but now it's being resuscitated for the express purpose of promoting awesome content around the network. As a Community Manager put it, here's what they're looking for:

  • Awesome/interesting/fun Questions & Answers
    We'll feature a few of these per week and try to make sure that they're representative of a broad collection of our sites. This includes notable meta posts, too - though I'm guessing they'll be infrequent.
  • Site events/contests
    If a site has a regular or one-off event, we may be able to tweet about some of them. Some of y'all do events throughout the year and we'd love to share some of the community-led fun.
  • Users who do noteworthy work or meet celebratory rep levels
    We won't Tweet about anyone without reaching out to them first... but if there's someone you think deserves (and would appreciate) a spotlight on what they've been doing, either on main and/or meta, let us know.

They're looking for great posts both young and old - I have word that a "Throwback Thursday" of sorts is in the works - and given that people here have written some phenomenal stuff over the years, we definitely have lots to choose from (as well as plenty of new stuff, too). Here's the first tweet, which I think is a good example.

How will this work?

There are a couple of levels to this.

  1. First, Worldbuilding users will write an answer to this question with a link to the content and a short blurb about why it should be tweeted out to 17,640 people and counting.
  2. Periodically (probably more regularly than I expect), the mods will go through and look at submissions. If we see stuff that looks good - and I bet that there will be lots of that - we'll forward that to the Community Team via super-secret backchannels.
  3. A Community Manager will manually select posts to be tweeted.

Let me add a note here: Please be careful about the posts you suggest for tweeting. Worldbuilding sometimes deals with subjects that are delicate, controversial, or otherwise likely to be problematic for Twitter. While there are two rounds of sorting by human eyes between a suggestion and the Twitter account, we would all prefer that people exercise some common sense and not suggest problematic topics. (I can't really make it less vague than that without loss of generality - sorry!)

Other random notes

  • Worldbuilding, specifically, has some specific content that might be worth featuring on the Twitter account, like topic challenges (if we have those, from time to time). This is, of course, in addition to all the awesome questions and answers we could feature.
  • Also, @StackExchange is occasionally going to be tweeting content along the lines of what we had been thinking about for our own Twitter account. I'm not saying this is going to replace that proposal - and note also that given how much HNQ attention we get, we might not be the site that gets a whole lot of tweets from Stack Exchange - but it's definitely going to overlap.
  • Finally, I have it on good authority that here may be a Throwback Thursday-style set of tweets each week - so feel free to submit some old posts, as well as new ones!

Whatever happens, @StackExchange is going to be a great opportunity for us and the rest of the network. What content from Worldbuilding Stack Exchange do you want to see on it?


Addendum, January 2020:

@StackExchange stopped doing this kind of thing fairly quickly, partly out of a dearth of suggestions (which, I suppose, we could fix. . .) and partly due to a lack of time. That said, as of late 2019, Stack Overflow is doing weekly roundups of interesting questions across the network; you can tweet candidate posts at them using the hashtag #StackOverflowKnows. We do still have an opportunity here for promoting some our awesome-est posts.

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    $\begingroup$ On a more serious note, how old can a post be before it's considered "throwback Tuesday" fodder? (Or the other way around, how old can a post become before it's no longer considered recent enough to post on Wednesday?) $\endgroup$
    – JBH
    Mar 17, 2019 at 20:02
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    $\begingroup$ @JBH I don't think there's a hard cutoff, to be honest; I think it's best to just submit content and not worry about how it'll be classified. $\endgroup$
    – HDE 226868 Mod
    Mar 17, 2019 at 22:55

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Some recent answers I think are deserving of Twitter:

Quenching swords in dragon's blood: why?

Reason for posting: The question itself is concise, clear and relatable, with an interesting idea and reasonable scope. The answers obtained are various and all of high quality, bringing together theory and practical application, with some debate about whether or not it's actually feasible. There's a ton of good information in there, and it's all well-written to be available to a broader audience. Also, it's about dragons - and we're one of the few sites to handle those gracefully.

Plausible reason for gold-digging ant

Reason for posting: Again, the question is concise, clear, and interesting. There's a well-placed link to a Wikipedia page, and the question is already protected to prevent spam answers from random Twitterers. The answers cover a wide swath of ideas, and I personally learned a lot from reading through them. They're all high-quality, with pictures that are engaging but not distracting and have proper links to obey CC-BY-SA. Also, it's about ants.

How much steel armor can you wear and still be able to swim?

Reason for posting: This is an interesting question that I think a lot of people have wondered about at one point or another. The answers cover a wide swath of ideas and experiences, from real-world references to theoretical calculations. There's some good discussion about what exactly constitutes steel armor across different cultures, and a flat-out amazing pun from WillK in the comments to his answer.

Summoning A Technology Based Demon

Reason for posting: This question touches more on the science-fiction side of the site in an interesting way. While the question itself is a little broad and could use some expansion, the answers and comments do an excellent job of encompassing that broad nature and still providing interesting answers all across the computer-science domain.

Throwback Thursday material:

What would a planet spinning fast enough to allow geostationary orbit near the surface look like?

Reason for posting: Well, it’s certainly old enough to be Throwback Thursday material. I think it’d be cool to feature something with a little more connection to other sites in the network, and people are always excited to read about space. The question is probably a little too broad by our current terms of the site, but the answers do an excellent job of bringing all the major points together coherently. The main answer is a detailed, in-depth explanation that remains highly readable. The other answers provide supporting context and valuable other options.

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This question mostly because of the excellent accepted answer: Natural Projectile Weapons

A clear and incredibly detailed description of a surprisingly complex topic.

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I like the idea of highlighting our Anatomically Correct series, either directly by advertising the Meta post, or perhaps in a more entertaining way by advertising a popular question in the series, such as L.Dutch's Anatomically correct Panotti or Renan's very popular Anatomically correct sharknado shark.

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    $\begingroup$ For what it's worth, I submitted the Purim Torah tag on Mi Yodeya (it's a seasonal thing we do for a couple weeks each year and it's happening now), and they decided instead to tweet a current question from it and explain what's going on (briefly) in the tweet. We should probably focus on individual questions, just based on that precedent. (Granted, all of this is new and could change.) $\endgroup$ Mar 17, 2019 at 22:34
  • $\begingroup$ @MonicaCellio, that's fine with me, let's submit Renan's Sharknado question. $\endgroup$
    – JBH
    Mar 17, 2019 at 23:26

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