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A Chrome extension showed me how much of my feed was silently hidden in Nairobi
Last month I was arguing with a friend in Nairobi about a protest there and realized half the posts I pulled up in a search were just gone from my feed. I installed a small extension called FeedWatch that logs what gets pulled from my timeline, and in 4 days it caught 63 posts vanishing, mostly hashtag stuff about the same event. I started screenshotting the missing ones and posting them with dates, and two of them came back after about a week. Has anyone tried logging their own feed like this, or is there a better tool than FeedWatch for keeping a record?
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lisat601d ago
Man, the part that gets me is those two posts coming back after a week. That tells you something most people logging their feeds aren't tracking: the question isn't just what disappears, it's what comes back and when. If a post gets pulled and then quietly restored, the restored version might not be the same text you screenshotted, and nobody would ever know unless they saved the original first. So the real trick with any logging tool is to grab the full post, not just the fact that it existed. Timestamp, full text, account name, and a screenshot all together, because the count alone won't help you later. FeedWatch sounds fine for catching what vanishes, but I'd back it up with your own files on your own drive, since anything sitting in a browser extension could go poof too.
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