
Show HN: Go-odbye – Twitter Follow/Unfollow Reporting Tool Written in Go - DLion
https://domenicoluciani.com/2016/08/29/go-odbye.html
======
mjsweet
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

~~~
Mahn
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.

~~~
0xmohit
I thought that it was true about vi(m).

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

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

~~~
HowardStark
The real mystery is: what comes first?

------
spriggan3
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 ...

~~~
SyneRyder
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.)

~~~
spriggan3
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.

------
DLion
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!

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

~~~
SyneRyder
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.

------
asimjalis
Why was this flagged? Seems like an appropriate submission.

~~~
0xmohit
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
junke
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](https://github.com/dlion/go-
odbye/blob/master/main.go#L27)

~~~
0xmohit
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.

~~~
DLion
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!

------
buro9
I created my own Twitter Go project yesterday:
[https://github.com/buro9/deleteoldesttweet](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/](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](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](https://github.com/ChimeraCoder/anaconda)

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

------
endswapper
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.

~~~
tantalor
What other tools?

~~~
endswapper
[http://who.unfollowed.me/](http://who.unfollowed.me/)
[https://manageflitter.com/unfollow](https://manageflitter.com/unfollow)
[https://tw.unfollowgram.com/](https://tw.unfollowgram.com/)

------
corndoge
Good job!

------
bitlax
Then what?

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

Do you care to elaborate?

~~~
mrweasel
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.

~~~
a_bonobo
There's heaps of marketing tools (random example:
[http://who.unfollowed.me/](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.

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

~~~
Veen
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.

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

~~~
throwanem
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.

