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Maybe I can explain better. There are two concerns. One is, what is ethical and right for a person to do? On this we agree. Building botnets to spam Twitter is

by inimino 10y ago

Maybe I can explain better. There are two concerns. One is, what is ethical and right for a person to do? On this we agree. Building botnets to spam Twitter is not ethical and people shouldn't do it. The other concern is, what should we do about it? This is where I "chastised" you, because focusing on the ethical behavior of members of the public is generally useless. If the people commenting here didn't do it, someone else would. That doesn't excuse them, but it does mean going after them isn't an effective strategy. Imagine trying to fight email spam by shaming individual spammers. Many people have done it. It doesn't work. If those people had redirected their energy towards fixing the system, rather than the people, the spam problem could have been solved decades ago. > The HN mods could grab the IP history of the fraudster user and pass them to twitter. Besides setting a bad precedent for HN, this would be useless. Twitter already has access to much more information than the BBC did when they did their investigation. Twitter simply doesn't care to act on it. If it was a priority for Twitter, they would fix it, certainly not by bringing a lawsuit, but by applying a technical solution across the board. By blaming the bad actors, you take heat off of Twitter, and encourage people to waste their efforts doing things that will never make a difference.

KirinDave 10y ago
> because focusing on the ethical behavior of members of the public is generally useless. If the people commenting here didn't do it, someone else would. That doesn't excuse them, but it does mean going after them isn't an effective strategy. But... we're talking to the people that did. It is no hypothetical, no question. Past tense. Done. Did. I'm not expecting this to axiomatically solve all twitter abuse. I do hope it will spark a conversation about how absolutely ruthlessly amoral many people here are. I hope young people looking for funding for a startup will think twice when they see what kind of environment HN creates. Do you really want to plant your flag and take money from people who enable fraudsters from the very ecosystem you plan to engage with? I point out people like that all the time in many venues. Because I think that raising awareness of the utter amorality of the software industry means more amoral assholes will be penalized for their actions. Perhaps this is naïve, but it is a conceit I will not easily give up. > Besides setting a bad precedent for HN, Yeah the bad precedent of, "Don't boast about how you're destroying the ecosystem we're trying to build a living on." We wouldn't want to disenfranchise the wretched thieving toe-rags who think making political twitterbomb networks, now would we? > Twitter already has access to much more information than the BBC did when they did their investigation. Twitter simply doesn't care to act on it. If it was a priority for Twitter, they would fix it, certainly not by bringing a lawsuit, but by applying a technical solution across the board. It's curious how the instant I mention sending data to twitter for enforcement suddenly that, too, is useless. We should focus on making twitter do something but since they don't care we shouldn't bother. Lower our arms from supplication and sink into the mud, I suppose? > By blaming the bad actors, you take heat off of Twitter, No see, I have enough incandescent bile that I can do both. But you seem to want to do neither.
- inimino 10y ago
  I agree Twitter should be taken to task, but it seems naive to think Twitter cares and is unable to solve the problem when so many indications point to spam and bots being a massive part of their traffic and them looking the other way. Around the election, I noticed on every Trump tweet the second or third reply would be someone selling a "liberal tears" mug. They had a set sequence of posts and replies leading up to that one with the link and they hit every single one of Trump's posts like clockwork. This went on for weeks. We are talking about blatant and totally unambiguous commercial spam on one of the highest-profile Twitter accounts. If they don't even deal with the trivially obvious, what are they going to do about the sophisticated attacks which just so happen to inflate the numbers that affect their revenue? The precedent I am talking about would be HN moderators getting involved in detective work and in reporting people, a huge and unrewarding task, in this case, for a company that perfectly obviously doesn't care, and is just going to drop the information on the floor. And what are they going to do with one IP address, anyway? I understand your outrage, but it just isn't practical. If you want to make Twitter do something, outrage directed at their top management, where it belongs, may have an effect, if it gets picked up by the press and starts to affect their share price or advertisers. Even that is a long shot. Honestly, if you really care, I hope you can find some people building something better and collaborate with them, rather than trying to make Twitter better, which I think is unlikely to ever work.

by inimino 10y ago

KirinDave 10y ago

> because focusing on the ethical behavior of members of the public is generally useless. If the people commenting here didn't do it, someone else would. That doesn't excuse them, but it does mean going after them isn't an effective strategy. But... we're talking to the people that did. It is no hypothetical, no question. Past tense. Done. Did. I'm not expecting this to axiomatically solve all twitter abuse. I do hope it will spark a conversation about how absolutely ruthlessly amoral many people here are. I hope young people looking for funding for a startup will think twice when they see what kind of environment HN creates. Do you really want to plant your flag and take money from people who enable fraudsters from the very ecosystem you plan to engage with? I point out people like that all the time in many venues. Because I think that raising awareness of the utter amorality of the software industry means more amoral assholes will be penalized for their actions. Perhaps this is naïve, but it is a conceit I will not easily give up. > Besides setting a bad precedent for HN, Yeah the bad precedent of, "Don't boast about how you're destroying the ecosystem we're trying to build a living on." We wouldn't want to disenfranchise the wretched thieving toe-rags who think making political twitterbomb networks, now would we? > Twitter already has access to much more information than the BBC did when they did their investigation. Twitter simply doesn't care to act on it. If it was a priority for Twitter, they would fix it, certainly not by bringing a lawsuit, but by applying a technical solution across the board. It's curious how the instant I mention sending data to twitter for enforcement suddenly that, too, is useless. We should focus on making twitter do something but since they don't care we shouldn't bother. Lower our arms from supplication and sink into the mud, I suppose? > By blaming the bad actors, you take heat off of Twitter, No see, I have enough incandescent bile that I can do both. But you seem to want to do neither.

inimino 10y ago
I agree Twitter should be taken to task, but it seems naive to think Twitter cares and is unable to solve the problem when so many indications point to spam and bots being a massive part of their traffic and them looking the other way. Around the election, I noticed on every Trump tweet the second or third reply would be someone selling a "liberal tears" mug. They had a set sequence of posts and replies leading up to that one with the link and they hit every single one of Trump's posts like clockwork. This went on for weeks. We are talking about blatant and totally unambiguous commercial spam on one of the highest-profile Twitter accounts. If they don't even deal with the trivially obvious, what are they going to do about the sophisticated attacks which just so happen to inflate the numbers that affect their revenue? The precedent I am talking about would be HN moderators getting involved in detective work and in reporting people, a huge and unrewarding task, in this case, for a company that perfectly obviously doesn't care, and is just going to drop the information on the floor. And what are they going to do with one IP address, anyway? I understand your outrage, but it just isn't practical. If you want to make Twitter do something, outrage directed at their top management, where it belongs, may have an effect, if it gets picked up by the press and starts to affect their share price or advertisers. Even that is a long shot. Honestly, if you really care, I hope you can find some people building something better and collaborate with them, rather than trying to make Twitter better, which I think is unlikely to ever work.