Japan prefectures drift away from posting disaster warnings on X | Hacker News Reader

Japan prefectures drift away from posting disaster warnings on X

japantimes.co.jp

95 pointsmikhael52 comments

Um, good? Facebook and Twitter should never have been allowed to become the default for this, anyway.

These services should have an always up web page. With an RSS feed. So anybody can connect to it and shove the warnings out however they want.

C'mon. I'm totally into tech etc and even I don't use any RSS based tools. Warning systems need to hook into the platforms people are already using. People aren't going to go out of their way to sign up to an alert that will probably never happen.

I don't think there's any country where most people use Twitter at all, much less use it often enough that they would incidentally see an emergency alert from their local government.

That's an argument against using it as the sole means of communication, which no one has proposed.

Twitter is big in Japan. Same for Facebook in some countries.

C'mon. I'm totally into tech etc. and even I never use Twitter (er, "X") at all, and never have.

Who actually uses Twitter? No one I know.

The point is that in an alternate reality, in the absence of terrible experiences like Twitter and Reddit controlling what we see with algorithms, RSS tools we have greater personal control of are what we could be/should be using instead.

Assuming you trust whoever is providing the feed to not filter it, and to maintain it forever.

I receive warnings by SMS. It seems to work fine if there is some storm danger.

During covid Taiwan IIRC from an interview with Audrey Tang also used SMS with great results.

They almost always do have a website and self hosted stuff. That no one uses. So the government and companies also try to reach out to platforms where they people are. Which was once TV and radio. Is now social media.

> Is now social media.

So presumably that means more services than just Twitter? Because (at least in the US) most people don't use Twitter. That's not a recent thing, that's always been the case.

It's difficult for most transit agencies to maintain the sort of uptime that a social media company does.

But there should be no login wall on posts from government agencies (grey check).

A third party service who's contracted to do it would be the right move in that case. Operating critical processes through a company with no obligation to provide that service is dumb. The evidence is in the outcome here.

We trust the metro companies to run critical infrastructure for our cities, I am sure they can organise a website.

How about paying for Twitter Blue, in exchange for: (1) No login wall on content from transit agency

(2) Uptime SLA

This will be a lot more than $8/month of course, but likely less than contracting it out to the usual suspects of shady vendors.

Aren't RSS feeds a pull mechanism for end users? With social media, it ends up acting like a push to the user so that they get notifications in "near-realtime", which would be important for events like flash floods.

There are a number of services that will do push notifications for RSS feed changes. Agencies could use one of them.

RSS is a great, albeit forgotten, technology. The problem is the social media-obsessed NPCs of the world don't know how to use it. It didn't help that all the major browser vendors removed the technology and you need a standalone client these days.

>NPCs

Let's not. Everybody has different amounts of time to spend on forming their opinion about a given topic. If there's a topic you care about, and someone hasn't yet thought about it as much as you, in no way does that imply they're an unthinking automaton and it certainly gives you no grounds to call them one.

Lighten up, Francis.

Nah that's matrix thinking. There are wolves and sheep, so you better be a lion.

> RSS is a great, albeit forgotten, technology.

It's not that forgotten. RSS feeds are my "front page to the internet", where I get my news, etc. Even HN.

Most sites (at least in the set of the ones I care about) have RSS feeds.

Exactly. Or if for some reason they need the social bit Mastodon is an option. Additionally it has RSS output feeds for everything.

Same thing happened here in Australia, the ABC stopped posting a emergency and many other things https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/aug/09/abc-austr...

Personally I found the shuffles with the API a huge pain. I have a small bot and I previously just used a command line client to post my automated tweets.

With the API changes and new keys those clients all stopped working and the maintainers were uninterested in fixing them.

So now I have to implement oauth myself. Which as a busy person and poor programmer is a significant amount of work.

I went with paying IFTT a few dollars per month for now (because their API just lets me use a bearer key) but I suspect people/organisations that don't prioritize twitter won't bother.

Edit: I just checked an it looks like there might be some wrappers around the twitter interface now (twurl and twitter-api-client look promising) so perhaps time to revist.

> Personally I found the shuffles with the API a huge pain.

Why is it when Apple does this nearly every year right on schedule, they're lauded as stewards of progress?

Because when Apple does something to annoy or inconvenience existing users, it at least benefits Apple. They are pursuing what they see as rational self-interest.

What's happening at Twitter benefits nobody including the person who's giving the orders. It's completely inscrutable.

The Twitter API changes seem to have no real reasoning behind them whatsoever, except "well maybe we could squeeze more money out of the developers", which isn't likely to result in sympathetic attitudes.

In contrast, one could argue that Apple's API changes are generally intended to achieve some actual purpose (refactoring, better security, etc.) Of course, whether or not they succeed at that is a separate debate entirely.

Are they?

Assuming that's true, it might be because the demographics of Apple users is very different than the demographics of internet users in general.

Because Apple is a cult and it's users are brainwashed

Twitter got popular because people want to post small updates without managing a full blown website server and still be somewhat professional looking. Facebook was too informal at the time, and that's partly why WordPress was very very popular at the time.

Hadnt realised Twitter put in place limits like that. So literally they are blocking their power users, the ones who make the most content for other users.

> So literally they are blocking their power users, the ones who make the most content for other users.

AND they've made changes to their site which have rendered it impractical to use as a public "status page" -- for logged-out visitors, posts on an account's profile page are ordered by the number of likes, not chronologically, and pages for individual posts don't display replies.

Take a look at what this does to the National Weather Service's page, for example [1]. What's on top? Posts from years ago warning about hurricanes that have long since passed. They're still making posts about active weather threats, but there's no way to see them if you aren't logged in -- so it's no longer an effective way to reach the public at large. Nor does it help that their widget for embedding a Twitter feed on a web site has been broken for over a month [2]!

[1]: https://twitter.com/NWS

[2]: https://twittercommunity.com/t/embedded-tweets-not-working/1...

Musks’s bizarre decisions in running Twitter seem to stem from a belief that the Twitter platform itself is what draws in users, rather than the content on the platform. It’s quite baffling how someone who seems to spend every waking moment on the service has such a poor understanding of it.

I can't be convinced that this whole situation isn't just a group of tyrannical regimes and finance heavies clubbing together to bury Twitter (often used as a co-ordination place against their interests) and are simply using Musk as a front man because they have leverage over him.

Or maybe the worlds greatest genius just got in a dick waving contest with himself and lost.

It's an attack on progressives. That's how I've been viewing all of this. I can believe Zuckerberg is not a fan of Musks handling because Z tried to keep his users but manipulate their beliefs via targeted political posts (and this worked to some degree). Musk screwed the pooch and is just kicking out his users, which doesn't disempower them, it just makes them look elsewhere.

Interesting - but I don’t assume malicious intent when incompetence is a simpler explanation. Wealth does not imply universal competence, though it often gives its beneficiaries such a delusion.

Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice

This is probably how it starts. Users leaving for very practical reasons, with others leaving when the posts dry up.

Archive link for the full article (oh the irony): https://archive.ph/5oeJ0

National Rail (in the UK) still post live information on Twitter, which is now effectively invisible. Very annoying. Example: https://www.nationalrail.co.uk/service-disruptions/harpenden... links to: https://twitter.com/search?q=Harpenden%20(from%3Anationalrai... which just shows me an "X" login page.

Loginwall is critically bad for public information usage.

> Japan prefectures drift away from posting disaster warnings on X

Does everybody in Japan uses X(twitter) ?

I would expect that disaster warnings use some cell broadcast, not an obscure service.

I’ve been hoping for a Twitter Japan fork like there was for yahoo!…

Yeah Musk could probably have made back the majority of his investment just selling Twitter Japan to SoftBank. He only seems to be interested in the US anyway

That's what I was hoping for as well -- Twitter for Japan (with the Twitter brand) run by someone other than Elon Musk, and Elon Musk can keep his X.

I'm surprised a country still thoroughly obsessed with fax machines is posting anything on X.

Well they're not going be using Wayland, are they?

Japan is Twitters second biggest market.

For consumers maybe? But for official government dissemination of information? This is the topic of discussion.

Try doing anything remotely "official" in Japan without fax or a paper process with half a dozen ink stamps. It can't be done.

In the real world, localities are routinely using Line or Twitter to send information to inhabitants. This is maybe on top of some paper fliers or announcements on loudspeakers.

I don't know what this looks like in other countries, but we're talking about telling people about something, not updating your registered address.

A lot of the stamp stuff has been phased out during covid. I just went to the tax office the other week to change a business status thing, and while the form still had a spot for an inkan, they said it was no longer in use.

And more and more stuff can be done by scanning your MyNumber card now as well.

I haven't sent a fax in 10 years.

Fax usage in Japan is often exaggerated. Paper and stamp process is the real.

Lots of American businesses still use fax, especially law offices and real estate offices.

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