It started out as such a great idea: “a twitter tag where people could ask questions without being judged.” Unfortunately we live in a society where, as Carl Honore quite brilliantly said in his TED speech, “instant gratification takes too long.” Combine this with the fact that most people are plain lazy and the great idea that was #durftevragen (the dutch variation of #daretoask) soon became a source of great annoyance.
Instead of asking questions that stimulate discussion in the twitter community, people started using it more and more as a way to not think for themselves, and in time even doing a simple query on a search engine became too much brainwork for people. Not long after that masses started tweeting their questions, even if it was obvious that a quick google could answer it immediately.
Being a social media and twitter fanboy this annoyance became too much. Tweets like “Hoe maak je een printscreen met een MacBook? Waar is de prntscrn?” (courtesy of @IsabellevZuidam) (in english: “How do you take a screenshot with a MacBook? Where is the prntscrn button?”) became more and more frequent. Some people think I just think it’s annoying that people ask these questions, but I really don’t! I’m fine with the fact that not all people are computer experts, but what I do mind is that this question is extremely easy to google. And easy is an overstatement here, because if you copy-paste the tweet into google the very first link is the answer! Don’t beleive me? Here you go! See? It’s actually more work to tweet this question and wait for an answer than to google it!
It’s that final conclusion that led me to write a twitter bot, hoping that people would realize that if a twitter bot can find their answer they could have found it themselves! A few hours of coding later and @durftegooglen (“durf te googlen” means “dare to google”) was born. It’s a really simple bot and it runs by executing a simple four step plan:
- Find tweets with #durftevragen
- Google the content of the tweet
- Check if the google result is actually a good result
- Tweet a link with the answer back to the user
Obviously not all questions can be googled, and unfortunately there is still a lot of room for false positives in the heuristics I use to determine wether a search result is a good result or not, but it’s a start.
My conclusion: google before you tweet… seriously. And I suggest to start banning #durftevragen and start using #googleweethetniet (“google doesn’t know”). Why the change of tags? Because maybe if the tag suggests that you’ve already tried to google it people will actually try to google it first too!
[...] Dit blogartikel was vermeld op Twitter door Rinse Tulp, Thomas Vervest. Thomas Vervest heeft gezegd: The why of @durftegooglen: "Because a tweet still isn't faster than Google" http://vl.am/00l (this time with the right link!) [...]