Automating social media posting for my new blogposts

I love blogging and I've benefitted a lot from what it's done for me ever since I started my first Geocities page in the mid 1990s. I maintain a technical blog at mlops.systems and a somewhat less technical blog at alexstrick.com/blog, though hope at some point to merge these together.

In the past I would have been content with ensuring that my blog published an RSS feed and known that anyone wanting to follow what I was writing could do so simply by connecting their feed reader and subscribing. I've become more conscious in recent years of a healthy brew of ambivalence, ignorance or even outright hostility to even the idea of RSS feeds and readers. It seems many people don't have RSS as an essential part of their informational hygiene any more. (I'll put my sadness / confusion about this to one side for now.)

And if I love blogging, I really dislike having to post my new blog posts to social media one by one, coming up with some catchy yet not overtly breathless summary of what I wrote, since this is apparently what many people use instead of RSS.

I've been grumbling under my breath about this situation for this for a few years now, but when ChatGPT came out it seemed like an obvious use: summarise my blogpost and repost to all my social media accounts taking into account their particular needs. (Mastodon uses hashtags more than the others, whereas LinkedIn posts can be a bit longer, vs Twitter which needs to be a bit shorter and so on.)

I held off, thinking I'd want to set up some system fully under my control involving serverless function calls and so on, but then I was reminded that I already use Zapier for some other administrative tasks. So this afternoon I set up and turned on some automation for social media posting to my Mastodon, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. Posting happens at one step removed since I queue my posts in Buffer so that they go out at a time when people are more likely to see them. I apologise / don't apologise for this. My blog writings remain wholly un-automated; it would completely remove the point of 'learning through writing' if I were to automate the things that I blog about. My social media postings (just one post per blogpost so as not to spam you all) are from now on automated. As an additional courtesy / discourtesy, I've tweaked the prompt such that the social media posts should always read just slightly 'off' and will be labelled with an #automated hashtag.

Tweeting to the Void

I've previously written about how I turned off Facebook's news feed. I keep an account with Facebook because people occasionally contact me there. It is also an unfortunate truth that many companies in Jordan (where I live) or in the wider Middle East only have representation on Facebook instead of their own website. (Why they insist on doing this baffles me and is perhaps a topic for a future post).

I have long preferred Twitter as a medium for filtering through or touching -- however obliquely -- things going on at any particular moment. I have no pretensions to actively follow every single tweet to pass through my feed. Rather, it's something I dip into every now and then.

Increasingly in recent months, I found myself growing dissatisfied with the pull it often has on me. It has become something of a truism to state that 'twitter isn't what it once was', but there's less and less long-term benefit in following discussions as and when they happen.

RescueTime tells me that I spent 86 hours and 16 minutes on Twitter in 2017 -- just under quarter of an hour each day. That feels like a lot to me.

Enter 'Tweet to the Void'. This is a Chrome extension. (For Firefox and other browsers, I have to imagine things like this exist.) When I visit twitter.com, the feed is not visible. All I see is somewhere to post a tweet if that's what I want to do. (There is still some value in posting blogposts and articles there, since I know some people don't use RSS). Of course, I can always turn off the extension with ease, but adding this extra step has effectively neutralised Twitter for me. 

Try it; see how you feel about having something standing in the way of your social media fix. Let me know how you get on.

Talking DevonThink with Gabe Weatherhead

I’ve been on a bit of a DevonThink kick these past weeks, and the catalyst for all of this was a conversation I had with Gabe Weatherhead (@macdrifter over on Twitter, though that account is no longer active).

You can listen to the full episode on your podcast player of choice or over on the Sources and Methods site. Towards the end of the episode we get into the weeds on how he uses DevonThink Pro Office and several other pieces of software. I’m looking forward to hearing Gabe’s much-anticipated appearance on MacPowerUsers in January, since I imagine he’ll go into even more detail there.

We also discussed social media and some of the ways he found himself drifting away from commonly-used sites like Facebook and Twitter. For me, this was the most interesting part of the podcast.

Nutritional Density

I wrote a few weeks back about how fundamentals are often superior to hacks. It seems it’s a useful mental model to employ as I’ve encountered various other expressions of more or less the same thing.

In the context of food and nutrition science, the call for nutritional density has become commonplace. This either takes the form of warnings against eating ‘empty’ food — i.e. foods with little broad-spectrum nutritional value even if they pack a caloric punch — or at the other end it is the Kale brigade.

I think there are a lot worse things we could do than strive for nutritional density in dietary choices, and I’ve also been thinking more about how it probably applies to the kinds of information we consume. This could mean choosing books that are perhaps older, but are less ephemeral or have stood the test of time. For language-learning, perhaps it means really diving deep in one text to really suck the marrow from each and every sentence (if you’ll excuse the carnivorous image). I’ve been slowly weaning myself off the output of social and non-social media for this very reason, though perhaps now I’ve only started to gain the vocabulary to describe what I was doing. In any case, food for thought for a Thursday evening.

On Untangling Syria's Socially Mediated War

Some old photos from when I used to live in Damascus

How do we figure out what is going on in a country like Syria, when journalists, researchers and civilians alike are targeted with frustrating ease? Is it enough to track what is being posted on social media outlets? These two questions are at the core of a fascinating recent(ish) study published by the United States Institute for Peace (USIP).

Syria’s Socially Mediated Civil War – by Marc Lynch, Deen Freelon and Sean Aday – came out in January 2014 and analyses an Arabic-and-English-language data set spanning a few years. It offers a useful overview of the social media trends as they relate to the ongoing conflict in Syria. It is especially relevant for those of us who aren’t inside Syria right now, and who are trying to understand things at one remove, whether that is through following social media output or talking to those who have left the country. (This means journalists, researchers and the like.)

Some stark conclusions emerge from the report. The ones I’m choosing to highlight here relate to how international media and research outlets have often been blind to structural issues that obscure their ability to understand Syria from outside the country.

“Social media create a dangerous illusion of unmediated information flows.” [5]

The role of translation or the importance of having research teams that are competent in both English and Arabic comes out very strongly from the research.

“The rapid growth in Arabic social media use poses serious problems for any research that draws only on English-language sources.” [page 3]

The report details how tweets about Syria in Arabic and English came to be different universes, how the discourse rarely overlapped between the two and that to monitor one was to have no idea of what was going on in the other:

“Arabic-language tweets quickly came to dominate the online discourse. Early in the Arab Spring, English-language social media played a crucial role in transmitting the regional uprisings to a Western audience. By June 2011, Arabic had overtaken English as the dominant language, and social media increasingly focused inward on local and identity-based communities. Studies using English-only datasets can no longer be considered acceptable.” [6]

Also:

“The English-language Twitter conversation about Syria is particularly insular and increasingly interacts only with itself, creating a badly skewed impression of the broader Arabic discourse. It focused on different topics, emphasized different themes, and circulated different imagery. This has important implications for understanding mainstream media’s limitations in covering Syria and other non-Western foreign crises and raises troubling questions about the skewed image that coverage might be presenting to audiences.” [6]

Also:

“researchers using only English-language tweets would be significantly misreading the content and nature of the online Twitter discourse.” [17]

And:

“These findings demonstrate once again the insularity of English-language journalists and the rapid growth of the Arabic- speaking networks. Both findings are potentially troubling for at least two reasons. First, they imply a journalistic community whose coverage may be influenced more by its cultural and professional biases than by the myriad constituencies within Syria and across the region. Second, they point to the power of social media to draw people into like-minded networks that interpret the news through the prism of their own information bubbles.” [26]

The general ideas in here won’t necessarily come as a surprise but I found it instructive to see just how different those two discourse universes are in the report.

In a separate but not-unrelated note, I have been thinking of ways that I can stay engaged in what’s going on in Syria beyond just consuming reports at one step removed. I’m working with a beta-testing team using a piece of software called Bridge – made by the lovely team at Meedan – which allows for the translation of social media and the use of those translations as part of an embedded presentation online. I will be translating strands and snippets from certain parts of Syria’s social media universe in Arabic. More on this soon, I hope.