Remove auto-generated “Thread” tweets

  • Resolved chsilverman

    (@chsilverman)


    4 years, 11 months ago

    Is there any way to stop Jetpack from adding the “Thread ⬇” tweets to the beginning and end of a thread? They look spammy, and if I delete them, my Twitter thread starts with a “this tweet was deleted by the author” note, which looks even worse.

    I just want more control over what I post. I don’t want Jetpack adding content to my threads.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • Plugin Author Jeremy Herve

    (@jeherve)

    Jetpack Mechanic 🚀

    4 years, 11 months ago

    Thanks for the feedback! To clarify, would you want to not have the whole first and last tweets, or would you want to remove just the Thread ⬇ mention from the tweet?

    If you would like to delete just “Thread ⬇”, you can do so before you publish your post, from the block editor. In the Jetpack sidebar, you’ll find an option to customize the message that is posted at the beginning of the thread.

    Let me know if that helps.

    Thread Starter chsilverman

    (@chsilverman)

    4 years, 11 months ago

    Hi Jeremy. Ideally, I’d rather not have the first and last tweets at all. They emphasize that this is an auto-generated Twitter thread from somewhere else, which really isn’t how I want to come across on Twitter (especially considering the hostile reaction the thread-posting feature got in the first place). I personally very much like Jetpack’s ability to post threads, but I need to be able to do that in a way that feels more natural to Twitter and less impersonal/marketer-ish. Having an option to turn off the automatically inserted tweets would be fantastic.

    I did experiment with editing the initial message to make it a little more personal, but even with that, Jetpack still tacks on a link to the blog post, and adds *another* link at the end, which I’d have to manually delete.

    I very much appreciate you taking the time to reply, and I don’t mean to sound angry—just frustrated that Jetpack is publishing my content in a way that I think misrepresents me and I can’t control. It’s very useful, and it would be exactly what I need for my project if it just didn’t do that one thing.

    Plugin Author Jeremy Herve

    (@jeherve)

    Jetpack Mechanic 🚀

    4 years, 11 months ago

    Thanks for the extra details.

    They emphasize that this is an auto-generated Twitter thread from somewhere else

    Indeed. That was the intent when we developed the feature. We wanted Twitter followers to know that this wasn’t “just a thread”, that this was a blog post first. In a way, we consider your WordPress site as your digital home. This is a place where you own your content, and where it will live first and foremost. It is where you share your thoughts and publish content. Your Social Media profiles (Twitter account, Facebook Page, …) are ways to promote your site.

    Jetpack’s Publicize feature allows you to do a bit more with your Twitter account. Instead of just promoting your site, your Twitter account becomes a place where you may get engagement and start discussions about specific parts of your post. Those discussions would most likely have happened as comments on your site a few years ago, when Social Media wasn’t as big as it is today 🙂

    In addition to this consideration, it’s worth noting that Twitter is limited into the type / format of content it allows, by design. When posting on your own site, you’ll always be able to do more: add different blocks, different embeds, different ways of displaying media, headings, captions, … These nuances and options aren’t always something that can be displayed in a Twitter thread, hence the need for a link back to the full content.

    Hopefully this gives you a bit more insight into what drives our decisions when building the Publicize features in Jetpack.

    All that said, I understand that this may not match your expectations. Those references back to the original post, while promoting your site, may make the threads less personal and look like an automated posting.

    I’ve opened an issue for your suggestion here:
    https://github.com/Automattic/jetpack/issues/19744

    When we next iterate on the Twitter Threads, we’ll consider adding an option to allow such customizations.

    Until then, I’m afraid I don’t really have a good alternative, short of deleting tweets manually like you’ve done until now.

    Thanks again for the feedback!

    Thread Starter chsilverman

    (@chsilverman)

    4 years, 11 months ago

    I see the reasoning, some of it. In my case, though, I don’t want to emphasize the WordPress-ness of syndicated tweets, for the reasons I mentioned earlier. For what I’m building, I really do need the Twitter posts to be “just a thread”, and the promotional aspect feels kind of grubby, to the point that I’d be uncomfortable having Jetpack publish to my Twitter feed in the way that it does.

    This is why I think opinionated design decisions always, always need to be tempered by user control. Automattic’s product/marketing teams just can’t anticipate every use case. I don’t doubt that your data supports the assumption that many users will want to be more aggressive about marketing their blogs, and will find the auto-tweets useful. But in this instance, I’m building a microblog that’s a mirror of my Twitter account, not a destination for my Twitter followers. There’s no reason to drive people to the blog; the posts don’t provide anything that’s not on Twitter, and I’d much prefer interactions occurred on Twitter, as you pointed out yourself, and not the blog.

    I’ve been using WordPress since 1.0, primarily because it’s been very good about giving me near-absolute control over my site; my digital home, as you said. When a product design group at Automattic removes that control, and enforces its own preferences about how to best represent me online, it feels less like my home and more like someone else’s home.

    I very much appreciate you filing an issue about this; I’d think giving users more control over their content would be a reasonable idea.

    Thanks again for your time here.

    Plugin Author Jeremy Herve

    (@jeherve)

    Jetpack Mechanic 🚀

    4 years, 11 months ago

    That makes sense, thanks for the added information.

    I’m building a microblog that’s a mirror of my Twitter account, not a destination for my Twitter followers. There’s no reason to drive people to the blog; the posts don’t provide anything that’s not on Twitter

    In this scenario, I wonder if you may be interested in a small workaround.

    Instead of publishing on your microblog first, what about publishing on Twitter first, and then import your threads to a new post on your microblog? This way you’d have that “Twitter-first” look on Twitter, while still logging those threads on your site for safe-keeping.

    Here is more info about the import feature:
    https://wordpress.com/blog/2020/07/15/unroll-your-twitter-threads-into-wordpress/

    It may not be perfect, but maybe that can help you for now.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

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