I understand that the AskHistorians Twitter account was originally set up as a bot of some sort, based upon this old post . But I get the impression it isn't a bot anymore. How does it work? Who decides what to tweet about?
And as an aside, I must compliment the Twitter account. For some reason - perhaps the way Reddit prioritises posts - I seem to miss a lot of really interesting questions and answers. The Twitter account is a good way to find them.
Well thank you very much, glad to know someone here is reading it! :)
Not a bot! All-human team! 3-4 mods go through the sub and look for interesting and under-seen things. Topics selected are pretty random. Non-western non-military history tends to get a little extra love but not exclusively, we tweet a lot of that War-Hitler-Romans stuff too. Some of twitter selection is also an effort to outreach to The Historical Establishment (tm) who use twitter a lot more than other social media, so you'll see academically "hot" topics like body history and environmental history pop up on twitter highlights more than is a fair random sample, because we're looking for things to appeal to that crowd.
A lot of our questions get an answer after the question has dropped off the page, so that's why a lot of The Good Stuff doesn't get seen naturally, our interesting content just moves at a slower pace than reddit's algorithms recognize. But we spy a lot of them by browsing the semi-secret comments feed, you can find it for any subreddit, by putting /comments/ after the name: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ It's kinda a dizzying way to browse the sub because it's so decontextualized, but fun!
Don't believe /u/caffarelli, it's a robot that's algorithmically programed to find the best stuff out there. It's the real deal.
But also, if you want to get even more great interesting questions and answer that you might have missed, check out the weekly Sunday Digest thread. The amount of good stuff people put on this sub that gets four to six up votes is astounding.
I wondered if we could build on this? It would be cool to have a collection of Twitter handles for people that post here. Perhaps we could send handle (and perhaps brief description of area) to mods who put list up, sans username, so that everyone gets to keep anonymity?