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> Twitter is bigger than any of the botters, and if it wanted it could raise the cost of entry of botting high enough that nobody would be able to afford the bo
by dmoy 9y ago
> Twitter is bigger than any of the botters, and if it wanted it could raise the cost of entry of botting high enough that nobody would be able to afford the bots in any quantity large enough to make a difference.
How would they do this without triggering enough false positives to destroy their product?
I mean seriously, if you are capable of doing this that well, you could probably walk into a job paying >>$750k/yr at any of the large tech companies, because they'd be falling all over themselves trying to get at your magic.
- ImSkeptical 9y agoSeems like, if you detect a bot, you should impose a captcha on every x actions. Not enough to ruin your customer's experience, but enough to make botting harder.
- dmoy 9y agoI would be absolutely stunned if Twitter et al. hadn't already tried this...
- jimnotgym 9y agoI wouldn't be suprised at all. Go find an openly racist account and report them. Two weeks later Twitter will agree with you...but not ban the account
- dawnerd 9y agoI’ve come to the conclusion after reporting hundreds of obvious spam/racism/hate/etc accounts that twitter just doesn’t care. It increases their metrics and that’s all they want. Makes the share holders happy to see numbers going up and sadly in turn it does increase ad views.
- ImSkeptical 9y agoI would be curious to know how this failed, if they did try it. Are captcha automatable? You could make it a bit better by challenging every X actions, and have X decline with a failed captcha.
- dmoy 9y agoCaptcha has issues in that: - captcha that isn't hard for humans is often easy to automate - captcha that is hard to automate frustrates a lot of humans too - and to add insult to injury you can "automate" the hard ones too by paying like $1 per 1000 captchas or something (think Amazon Turk like stuff)
- kibwen 9y ago> How would they do this without triggering enough false positives to destroy their product? This implies that Twitter has demonstrated that they care about practicing discretion when suspending accounts, and that they care what 99% of their (human) userbase thinks, and that Twitter's product is Twitter accounts. But they haven't; they don't; and it's not. The state of being pissed off at Twitter is the perpetual existence of all Twitter power users. Unless you're a celebrity, Twitter doesn't care what you say about Twitter. And the only thing important to Twitter's business model is keeping celebrities on Twitter. The reason that they don't give a damn about cracking down on bots isn't because they don't have enough $750k engineers, it's because dealing a blow to the egos of their Influencers by banning their botted followers would threaten their bottom line, both in terms of outrage from the 1% of Twitter accounts that matter and in terms of depressing their wildly inflated metrics.
- anigbrowl 9y agoTWitter trashed my very real account that was tied to a disused email address after I tried to log in from my phone and misremembered my password and refused to lift a finger to help me get it back despite me offering to provide all sorts of other verification information.
- nl 9y agoThat’s nonsense. It’s trivially easy, and as noted elsewhere they can just add a verification check for suspect accounts. It’s easy to see how much harder Facebook and Google accounts are to create bots for than Twitter. Twitter doesn’t care.