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Comment by MattGaiser | Hacker News Reader

On the other hand, public institutions have long been criticized for not communicating where the people are. Notices posted on their own website are unlikely to read by anywhere as broad an audience. Plenty uses newspapers, but even my grandparents get stuff from Twitter before the paper now, if just from younger people sharing it with them. I agree Twitter shouldn't be the only channel, but it is where the people are, or at least were.

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The answer would seem to be POSSE - Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere

https://indieweb.org/POSSE

If only we had a standard to make syndication of data simple, I mean really, really simple. It had to be so simple the standard could even be called Really Simple Syndication.

Oh what a great idea! And maybe Google could make something to read all those!

It’ll never last…

How does this help to fix the essentially non-technical problem that on long enough time horizons, and by long enough maybe 5 years at most these days, content that is optimized to provoke reaction ("engagement") outcompetes content that is optimized to promote contemplation, on any network, whether syndicated or not.

It doesn't, but I don't think governmental agencies particularly have a problem with posting outrage clickbait stories.

Yeah, they pay people to do that for them.

I don't see why they can't do both, have an official website (with RSS), and automatically share the links on Twitter.

Setting up an official website with RSS that allows nontechnical users to securely post in real-time costs time, money, and expertise.

Signing up for a Twitter account is free and can be done by literally anyone in the organization.

These days setting up a website costs $16/mo[0] and is so simple my 70yo father-in-law did it. I'm pretty sure most public agencies can find that in the budget.

[0] https://www.squarespace.com/pricing

They asked why, not what the difficulty/cost delta is.

The answer is because Twitter is easy and free. Self-publishing is neither.

well, it was. now we’re seeing these companies—who used as one of their primary selling points to lure in talent, “come help us make the world a better place”—in real time, one by one, we’re beginning to see their true motives and true colors come out as they begin to close up public access.

i think the real question is when, not if, we end up with public infrastructure.

And who is actually going to go to the website?

USA.gov

The government built the Internet. They can host a website.

The government hasn’t had much to do with the underlying infrastructure of the internet for decades.

This only makes sense for small organizations. Any medium sized government organization already has a web site.

What's harder: signing up for Twitter, or convincing the sysadmins in your medium sized government organization to let you update text on the site in real-time without change control for each edit? In a way that anyone nontechnical can do so securely and publish to RSS?

Hint: it's not the second one

Why do the sysadmins allow Twitter?

No change control there either.

They have no power over to disallow it.

Government sys admins refuse to host blogs?

It's worth noting that many government institutions nowadays have (often several) social media communications "officers" officers, whose only job it is to disaminate information via social media (twitter, Facebook...). Now you'd think that if they hire a person for these sort of things (btw keeping track of multiple social media account and monitoring relevant keywords is definitely not typical nontechnical user territory) they could train the person to update a cms as well.

School systems at least have systems to communicate with parents via automated messages that are delivered via text, emails and voice mail.

Or Remind, or ClassDojo, or Parentsquare, or whatever our school district goes with next year. I think they could all do SMS delivery, but none of them got it quite right. The apps are all buggy too. Various updates are often squirreled away on Twitter or "$schoolname Parents" Facebook group.

The right thing to do is post all updates on their own channels, then post links to them on Twitter, maybe with a headline or blurb.

They should have promoted RSS.

I think I remember suggesting RSS to them as an option. Utterly technically trivial. If they'd done that and then syndicated it out to Twitter etc, they could have served everybody.

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