Here’s the problem, I’m also pointing this at @kris11
Twitter doesn’t show all users the same view. There is an Algorithm that decides what people will see when they look at reply feeds and a handful of other things. Instagram is similar, and people who do social media for a living hate it. When you’re posting, you’re not trying to do sensible things, you’re trying to please The Algorithm.
So it’s perfectly within The Algorithm’s mindset that some people can see the tweets and I can’t. It has its own opinions about what I like to see, and it might think those rando bid tweets look like spam to me, so it’s showing me what it thinks I’m most interested in: Salty’s corrections and mentions to specifically me. Bids look like spam, and The Algorithm wants to protect me from spam. It also does dumb stuff like displaying tweets out of chronological order. Twitter is very, very sick.
This interacts very poorly with how The Algorithm filters threads. Nobody likes it. Life was easier back when Tweetdeck did it client-side, but Twitter broke all that in the name of directing everyone back towards the cruddy single-account clients that let them display ads. But like, what’s the point of ads on a platform that promises to automatically send your message to everyone who has opted in to your posts? It just results in weird stuff like the NFL paying for ads that first run ads Disney paid for to run in front of random ads. Social media sucks.
The one way around this (other than using eBay) is hashtags. The Algorithm doesn’t yet interfere with hashtag searches. So if you’d please, please, PLEASE tweet that the way to bid is to post a dollar amount with a specific hashtag for each item, that would make it possible for me and 99% of Twitter to participate.
As far as I can tell, even API makes this really hard. I can find “all tweets that mention your account since this tweet was made”, but then I have to do extra work to find the ones that particularly mention that tweet. The best search I did shows at least 5 people outbidding me but also adding “I can’t tell what the hell the current bid is”.
Use hashtags. Or eBay. Twitter hides things from users if you don’t use hashtags. 99% of your target audience doesn’t know how to search them.
I applaud your effort and don’t mean to make this sour. But Twitter as a platform is very, very bad at multi-item auctions unless you go about it a very specific way. I’m trying to help you figure out how to set it up so I can participate, because I want:
- To make a donation to this cause
- To make sure anyone who beats me to my coveted item has to pay through the nose.
But I’m not bidding if I have to write an application to find the people who are bidding against me. I’d rather donate directly to a charity.
Until such a time as hashtags appear, I call Numberwang.
