Hacker News Reader

Comment by hobs | Hacker News Reader

For random niche communities, twitter is great. For instance, I can tweet any SQL Server question to #sqlhelp, and frequently see some of the best consultants in the industry take a look and help.

IMO This mainly occurred because some people who were interested in providing free help and working towards community building had a nice incentive to do so (getting paid via other mediums/getting mind-share.) Nonetheless, still a hashtag I follow.

View on HN

140 character format seems very poorly suited to technical database questions. It's barely enough to name which version of the database you're using. I'm surprised this is a thing.

Twitter is the primary communications venue of the F# community #fsharp. You'd be surprised how much you can communicate in 140 characters when links get compressed. It's mostly about micro-blogging (hey look at this link) and succinct conversations.

But great for URLs to technical database questions. :)

You would be surprised how much you can fit in when you want to, but most of the time you would use it to advertise a post on SO, your blog, or whatever if you couldnt fit the needed information.

Screenshots help a lot in this scenario, and the reality is that you are not asking super in-depth questions like "How do I take this proprietary database design and refactor it to do such and such" (generally, due to the volume issues with twitter) but more related to ops issues, performance, or other weirdness.

We can subscribe to hashtags? I had no idea.

After double checking, this is not a native twitter feature (why not?) but something tweetdeck (the desktop client I use for twitter) offers.

I honestly dont even have twitter on my phone or home computer, though I have signed into their web interface occasionally, I almost exclusively use it at work.

Investors and day traders are also huge on twitter - not sure how valuable it is to follow them though. :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com