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Proposal: remove Twitter from profiles
Seeing the option to list a Twitter profile on one's profile leaves a bad taste in my mouth given recent developments on that site.
I don't think it deserves to be promoted above other social media websites. Why have an input box for your Twitter handle, but not your Truth Social handle? (I'm being facetious to make the point).
Discord kinda makes sense, since the chat channels are on there, but I think Twitter has lost any special status it may have once had.
Proposal:
- Kill the input box.
- Add all previously input Twitter profile info to the ends of people's profiles (to avoid the problem of people not being able to modify/remove them once the input box is gone...).
e.g.
Twitter: [@previouslyInputProfileName](https://twitter.com/previouslyInputProfileName)
I definitively agree with the premise of the suggestion, but instead of getting rid of all/most additional input fields …
9mo ago
I am not a big social media user. I have a LinkedIn account (2 actually, because I have no reason to pay for it so that …
10mo ago
Get rid of all that stuff. Having an easy way to make a link to a few kaffeeklatch platforms that are currently popul …
9mo ago
3 answers
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I definitively agree with the premise of the suggestion, but instead of getting rid of all/most additional input fields and instead of making it a per-instance/per-community thing (which both are generally good ideas), I'd go a step further and suggest to make it a per-user thing.
Mastodon has this feature, where every user gets four pairs of key-value-pairs which they can fill with arbitrary values. If it is a link—great, Mastodon will render it as such[1].
They are then displayed at the bottom of your profile (for my profile the metadata are the wwww.luap42.de, the verified website and the alignment)
I think this might be a good solution, because it gives maximum flexibility and customization. Maybe users don't want to post links to social media but instead want a link to their favorite music video, maybe they want to signify their pronouns, maybe they want to make a silly joke. Maybe they want to do all of that, because that would, too, be possible.
I opine that this is the best solution for ease of implementation (it's literally just eight text fields in the database) for ease of use (it's literally just eight input fields) and for powerfullness of features (it's literally eight input fields you can write arbitrary stuff into). I don't really see any disadvantage, if there are inappropriate contents they can be moderated away as any other profile contents.
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Also Mastodon has this really nice feature where you can "verify" the link if there is a matching
<a rel="me" href="{profile url}">element on the page, but this shouldn't be a top priority. ↩︎
I am not a big social media user. I have a LinkedIn account (2 actually, because I have no reason to pay for it so that I can merge accounts) and hardly use it. I have a Discord account and don't even know my user tag since I almost exclusively use it for Codidact. I tried Twitter once, so I probably have a username...but never use it. I don't have a Facebook account. etc. You get the idea.
But this really raises the issue that there is nothing special about Twitter. For the moment, there is something special about Discord with respect to the primary Codidact instance, because that is the location for chat. But another Codidact instance (private, or public but run by a different organization) might have nothing to do with Discord. I don't know the current configuration, but IMHO, the proper way to do this is:
- A table of profile alternate account definitions
- Each one includes name, description, input sample value and status (active, read-only, inactive). Active = normal, read-only if you want to turn something off without removing existing data (so allow a user to delete but not add or update) and inactive would get rid of it (but keep the user profile data in the database in case the community changes its mind).
- Each user profile includes optional fields for each of those accounts
Then each instance can make a decision based on any security, political, cultural or other reasons. Some people don't currently like Twitter - OK, remove it. A Codidact instance in some countries might say "absolutely no Tik Tok". Others might say "absolutely no Facebook". A private instance might even include a good old fashioned email address - we don't do that on the primary public Codidact instance as that is considered private information, but in a different context, such as a corporate internal site, that may be 100% appropriate.
The current primary instance then has 3 account definitions:
- Website - A link to anywhere on the internet for your stuff. - https://...
- Twitter - Your Twitter username, if you've got one you want to share. - @username
- Discord - Your Discord user tag, in the format username#1234. - username#1234
And if @ArtOfCode says "that's how we're doing it already" then my answer is obsolete.
Once this is all in the database rather than hardcoded (again, maybe it already is), any decision as to whether to turn off Twitter (or make it read-only) for this instance of Codidact becomes a community decision and not a technical one, and becomes a change that can be done as a simple database setting without any code changes.
Get rid of all that stuff.
Having an easy way to make a link to a few kaffeeklatch platforms that are currently popular doesn't add much value. Users can already add any links they want to their profile. That's even better since they then get to chose how the link is presented, what's said around it, how it's formatted etc.
As the OP's example pointed out, once you open the door to picking some, you are inherently making a political statement. Once you pick a finite set, you have to have rules for deciding which of the many virtual kaffeeklatches out there you want to appear to endorse. Maybe today you include Twatter and ButtBook, but by what rules are you not including FossilFuelsForever, SupremeArians, or whatever? Even if you have rules, their criteria are likely to be very subjective. Platforms come, go, and change. You'll be forever stuck with social platform whack-a-mole.
There is no problem to solve that the existing free-form profile every user already has doesn't solve better than pre-selected links.
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