Show HN: Go-odbye – Twitter Follow/Unfollow Reporting Tool Written in Go | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Go-odbye – Twitter Follow/Unfollow Reporting Tool Written in Go

domenicoluciani.com

47 pointsDLion44 comments

I honestly thought this would be the sorry of a developer frustrated with Go's lack of package manager and its pragmatism... wrong!

That said, I would like to be the first to say the following; is it really that necessary to not only include "Go" in the title of the post (as if it were a feature) but also in the name of the application? There, I said it ;) /s

There's an unwritten rule that says that if you program Go, whether you love it or hate it, you must ensure everybody knows about it. It would just be irresponsible otherwise.

I thought that it was true about vi(m).

A vi(m) user must always let others know about it.

We can now expand that stock phrase to "Atheist vegan vim-using crossfitter".

The real mystery is: what comes first?

And I use vim, I am sure you want to know it. /s

Have you used Python? Every other library has -py- in it somewhere.

Go ecosystem is full of Python refugees. That must be where we get it from.

This is a pretty common theme in new languages. New projects in Ruby used to have a strong tendency of starting with 'r', and I'd be surprised if it didn't use to be the case in others as well.

They get over it, eventually.

> They get over it, eventually.

Someone tell that to KDE!

Doesn't practically every package in Java-land start with "j"?

Guava, Storm, Guice, Apache Commons, Spring, Tomcat, Dagger. Sure you have your JMeter, JUnit, Jboss, but that trend is less so in newer packages, in my experience.

A better example would be Elixir, where every package is Ex Something, e.g. ExUnit, Exometer, ExRated.

Good point on Elixir, I should have spotted that, as I've been learning Elixir over the last few months.

I wish Twitter really had a way to filter subscriptions by "channels". If you tweet about databases and I subscribe because you did, I don't want to get photos of your daughter's birthday, your wedding, your favorite gang-star rap music, or your opinion about Hillary or Trump. I ended up un-following a lot of prominent devs because of this.

If Twitter had a way to filter followed people messages by keyword or hashtag It would lead to a healthier environment on that platform. Unfortunately since Twitter basically locked access to its API, writing a fully featured client with that capability isn't even a viable alternative for the terrible UX ...

This is an unsolved problem; some people work around it by managing multiple twitter accounts, one for each "channel". It doesn't scale by topics, though.

OTOH if I have to think about which channel / user I tweet to, I think people would tweet less. A bit of noise is ok, I guess.

Not a complete solution, but if you use a third-party client like Tweetbot (on iOS & Mac) or Fenix (Android) you should be able to setup a variety of mute filters, for example by keyword or hashtag. Putting Trump & Hillary as mute filters is one of the quickest ways to make your tweetstream more sane.

I still tweet sometimes about Eurovision, which I know must annoy many of my followers, so I try to use the hashtag on every Eurovision related post so that others can mute it if they're not interested. (I guess I should do the same for infosec & coding, so Eurovision fans who aren't into the tech stuff can mute those too.)

Nice idea, I didn't find a good client on PC that does it.

But it shouldn't be up to you or your followers to sort the tweets, I don't understand why Twitter doesn't implement this basic feature. The hell it could be something done in the front-end with no server-side code involved at all.

Author here, I wrote this tool just for fun and to learn go, no bad reason indeed or obsession et simila, that's all, I posted it here to receive feedbacks to improve me so any suggestion will be appreciated, thanks in advantage!

> https://github.com/dlion/go-odbye/blob/master/main.go#L91-L9...

FYI, you probably want some sort of retrial logic instead of a fatal error just for bumping up against a rate-limiting condition.

(As it turns out, the Twitter client library I wrote handles this retrial logic for you automatically: https://github.com/ChimeraCoder/anaconda )

You should make it optionally tweet to the users who unfollowed you, to try and get them back as followers.

Please don't! As someone who has unfollowed people and then been confronted (sometimes in person!) over my reasons for unfollowing, this would be very frustrating. It'd be a cool technical exercise perhaps, but socially a bad idea.

Why was this flagged? Seems like an appropriate submission.

Ditto. I'm not a fan of Twitter but this doesn't seem to be off-topic.

Those flagging this ought to read the guidelines [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Isn't "color.Unset()" dead code?

        if err != nil {
		color.Set(color.FgRed, color.BlinkSlow)
		log.Fatal(err)
		color.Unset()
	}

https://github.com/dlion/go-odbye/blob/master/main.go#L27

Even lines such as

  var plus int64
  plus = 0

could be written as

  plus := 0

The following

  if *url == true

should be written as

  if *url

Moreover, custom logger could be implemented to avoid code repetition.

I obviously knew that but I did it to be sure to do the right things and to write a more understanding code. I will edit it very soon, thanks!

You are right, on the start I used Printf instead of Fatal and after the change I forget to remove it, thanks!

I created my own Twitter Go project yesterday: https://github.com/buro9/deleteoldesttweet

The aim of that one is to delete all tweets... but, to do so by scraping Twitter's "First Tweet" page for the oldest tweet.

This needs to be done as it's not actually possible to delete old Tweets using the Twitter API as you cannot find your oldest tweets.

What I would like to achieve is to have Tweets be temporal, and to self-destruct after a period of time. The nature of the way that I use the service is that it is conversational, and a Tweet taken out of context long after the conversation is likely to not be a good representation of my views (fitting reason into 140 chars is hard).

I already use [Tweet Delete](http://www.tweetdelete.net/), but wanted to go back and nuke the older tweets too, hence this code.

But... I broke the page.

https://discover.twitter.com/first-tweet#buro9

That no longer returns my first Tweet, it's borked. My profile still shows I have 1,700+ tweets, but they seem to be totally inaccessible now. Oh well. I did manage to delete a good thousand or so, a small triumph.

Anyhow, Go code and Twitter, I heartily recommend this project:

https://github.com/ChimeraCoder/anaconda

It's an easy to use and quite complete package that implements the Twitter API.

I have to agree with the other comments here that there doesn't seem to be much utility and there are already tools that do this. Additionally, without doing the work for you I don't see how you are doing this any new or interesting way.

To take this to a constructive place, maybe this is more of a Show HN thing, rather than a release, where you show your interesting code.

What other tools?

http://who.unfollowed.me/ https://manageflitter.com/unfollow https://tw.unfollowgram.com/

Good job!

Then what?

Your overly short comment doesn't make any sense to me. Also, I see no connection to the article.

Do you care to elaborate?

I read it as:

Someone unfollows you. Then what?

Probably questioning the utility of the tool.

The comments a little short, but the question is valid. What use is the information that "TwitterUser123" un-followed you?

Are you going to write that person and ask why? Are you going to change your tweets because someone doesn't like your writing style, political views or personality?

It's a fun little project, but it's of little actual value.

There's heaps of marketing tools (random example: http://who.unfollowed.me/ ) around to track who followed you and to auto-follow and un-follow people based on whether they're following you. Many accounts on Twitter inflate their 'Followers' count by auto-following others in the hope that they follow back.

If they don't follow back after x days you can unfollow them again so that your 'Following' number isn't too inflated, and the ratio of 'Following'/'Followers' is better.

That honestly sound like a solution to problem that no honest person/company would even have.

It's a problem because people use vanity metrics like follower counts as a proxy for the popularity of a company and its product. That incentivizes businesses to inflate their follow counts.

In the real world, 10,000 useless bot or "follow back" followers should be less valuable than a thousand interested followers who are likely to buy something and promote your business.

In social media world its easier for startups to get the thousand "good" followers if they also have 10,000 worthless followers because the good followers will dismiss a business if its only followers are the co-founders and their moms.

I wonder want would happen if Twitter decided that your number of followers is irrelevant and just hide it.

They'd lop off a chunk of the ecosystem around their product that helps give it value, is what. Desirable as it might be, don't look for that to happen any time soon.

Obsess!

You unfollowed them back in revenge, of course.

Or maybe find a social engineering hack by way of which you can make others follow you (without them realizing it, of course).

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