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Twitter suspended our Open Data project's account and wiped all our followers

235 points by edent 9y ago

Rjevski 9y ago
I love it how they have “automated systems that remove spam” that somehow remove innocent accounts like this one but completely fail to remove blatantly obvious spam. I don’t expect the system to be bulletproof and remove advanced spam rings, but when obvious spam is allowed to stay on the platform I’m wondering what the idiots at Twitter are really doing.
- pound 9y ago
  re: "idiots at Twitter" - It's always nice to encounter someone smart on internet.
  - Rjevski 9y ago
    I assume this is sarcasm, so I’d like to point out that I don’t consider myself smarter than anyone else or anything - I say idiots simply because there’s no excuse where blatantly obvious spam (for example the crypto currency scam replies in response to famous accounts like Elon Musk) isn’t deleted automatically.
    - pound 9y ago
      If you know how to reliably solve that easy problem I'm pretty sure they're hiring
      - ksenzee 9y ago
        Solving that particular problem is not hard: trash any reply to a celebrity or viral tweet that includes a link and gets reported x times. There was a good Twitter thread on this recently, pointing out that we look for complicated solutions when simple ones would do. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/987602838594445312.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/987602838594445312.html
        empath75 9y ago
        If you’re relying on reports that can be gamed.
        Rjevski 9y ago
        > Automated systems can and will be gamed as well. Taking an user’s reputation, account lifetime, reputation of their followers, etc (so for example, a report from a new account has less weight than an established account with a good history) will sort that out. And when everything else fails, a proper appeals system where you talk to humans will solve this problem once and for all. False positives and abuse are bound to happen eventually, but they’re tolerable as long as you have a proper appeals process to deal with them.
        JoshTriplett 9y ago
        > Solving that particular problem is not hard: trash any reply to a celebrity or viral tweet that includes a link and gets reported x times. That's trivial to abuse, given a group of accounts filing false reports. That's not a hypothetical; as an example, Facebook's reporting functionality has been abused to attack people's accounts as part of various hate campaigns.
      - Rjevski 9y ago
        I’m sure their engineers (if they still have any - I haven’t seen any innovation from Twitter in a long time) are more than capable of fixing this if management lets them. Hiring more engineers isn’t going to solve it. Management and product is where the real problem is IMO.
      - A2017U1 9y ago
        Automatically flag any account making a reply with the same name or same picture. It's incredibly simple yet they don't do it.
  - fortythirteen 9y ago
    To be fair, if the only thing they're geniuses as is making a money pit look attractive to investors.
  - FRex 9y ago
    I once wanted to have a Twitter account without a phone number attached to it. It got banned within 5 minutes of being created, I didn't use Tor, proxy or anything shady, a normal Chrome browser and a normal gmail account. All I did was Tweet once (their own localized hell world tweet where I didn't even fill in the text). Reason was something that amounted to breaking their ToS via 'automated use' or some shit. Of course if I were to provide my mobile number it'd get instantly unlocked, 0 human oversight on that too. Opening a support ticket sent me their automated crap email saying the same thing and asking for phone number again to instantly get my 10 minutes old account unlocked. I never heard from a human. They reap what they sow. Edit: and by 'without a phone number' I mean I didn't fill it in when creating the account (I don't even remember if it asked there but I somehow got an account open without one), just out of principle of not wanting to give any more information than I need to any service I use. And of course I didn't divulge it after that borderline ransomware situation and my opinion of Twitter has dropped (generously speaking..). It was also my only ever attempt at having a Twitter account, not a secondary account or something like that. I also have a static Polish IP for years now, no other service ever 'caught' me for being a bot, it was in an up to date Chrome on Windows 10, etc.
- fortythirteen 9y ago
  It all makes sense when you realize that they're lying and their "automated system" is a bunch of low level contractors.
  - Rjevski 9y ago
    Most likely, but then I wonder, what do their 1k-5k (according to CrunchBase) employees really do? A simple spam flagging system (that’ll take care of the lowest hanging fruit aka very obvious spam) can be built even by a single engineer.
    - eli 9y ago
      How would that be different from the existing spam flagging system?
      - Rjevski 9y ago
        Well the existing system doesn’t seem to be working right. Blatantly obvious spam is allowed to remain, just see the spam replies to any big account’s tweets or spam on certain popular hashtags.
        eli 9y ago
        Or the existing system works as designed but your suggestion of a "simple spam flagging system that could be written by one engineer" is not a sufficient solution. (And keep in mind that any anti-spam tools will be definitely abused be trolls and other malicious actors to harass innocent users)
    - modsec 9y ago
      I see comments like this coming up on Hacker News almost every month and I tend to think that people who make these comments are either too young and/or have not worked for a mid-sized to a large company. If you have worked in any company that deals with internet-facing traffic serving the size of audience that Twitter does, it should be obvious that 1k employees is nothing if you want to have all the necessary teams you need to keep the business running, for example, software engineering, software support, hardware engineering, hardware support, network engineering, software engineering, HR, finance, legal, PR, management, IT department, etc. A company of this scale is not just code and raw technical skills. There are many nuances that you need to appreciate before you understand why it involves 1k-5k employees.
- modsec 9y ago
  > idiots at Twitter A constructive comment would have been to point us at good spam filters that are very good at not allowing obvious spam so that we do not make the same mistake that Twitter did and be labelled as "idiots" by the likes of you on the Internet.
  - Rjevski 9y ago
    Any of the open-source email spam filters? Not saying they’re excellent by any means but they’d at least take care of the most obvious spam there is. False positives can be dealt with appeals - allow people to actually appeal the decision and get a human to review it. I’d take the occasional false positive with a proper appeals system any day over the current cesspool that is Twitter.
    - modsec 9y ago
      Like what? SpamAssassin? You would be surprised how much obvious spam gets through it in the face of the kind of spam onslaught that goes on in the real world today. Seriously, this problem is not as easy to solve for machines as you think it is.
      - kaoD 9y ago
        Well, they're Twitter. How does Google filter all my Gmail spam? So far I've had one or two emails go through in all these years and my account is available in several leaks, receiving tens of spam mails a day. And email seems like a harder place to police, being decentralized. These guys control the gateway to the service!
  - crankylinuxuser 9y ago
    Or, you can spend human time to review a decision like "Delete account with known good history", rather than the current SV trend of 'automate it, fuck it, who cares? We'll wait until someone complains on HN or Reddit' The first rule is you don't delete user data without consent. The second rule, is you dont delete user data without consent! And yes, I work in the industry. Bad shit happens, and data can be lost. But trusting some automated 'spam detection algo' and making actionable, irrecoverable decisions on fuzzy math is completely idiotic, boneheaded, and fucking stupid! If you're in that product team, you deserve every shred of scorn you're getting.
- ropeadopepope 9y ago
  > I’m wondering what the idiots at Twitter are really doing. What if they're not idiots? What if that system is working exactly as intended?
  - Rjevski 9y ago
    Whoever designed how this system is supposed to work (as in, allow the spam to remain) is still an idiot in my view. Granted, I’m sure they have an agenda to justify this (aka boost user numbers as much as possible, even if all of them are bots) but as a user I don’t care - I see spam on the platform and I call them out for it.
    - ropeadopepope 9y ago
      > Whoever designed how this system is supposed to work (as in, allow the spam to remain) is still an idiot in my view Why? If you don't know what the goal is, how can you judge the results? Just because you don't care for the result doesn't make the person who designed the system an idiot. It makes you an idiot for continuing to use a system you hate.
      - Rjevski 9y ago
        I never said I used the system. I deleted my account in 2013 when they started making the platform worse and worse with every “upgrade”. I loved Twitter and I wish they get their stuff together and make it enjoyable again, but I’m not expecting anything anymore. They’re most likely going to go down the same way Yahoo did.
        ropeadopepope 9y ago
        > They’re most likely going to go down the same way Yahoo did. Unlikely. Yahoo actually had to make a profit. In 12 years, Twitter has only reported 1 profitable quarter. And yet, somebody (or somebodies) keep forking over billions of dollars to keep twitter up and running. Whatever their goal is, making money isn't it. My guess is their goal is the same as the major media outlets: to control the flow of information. It's a lot easier to do that without scrutiny if the tools appear to kick people off at random. The harder it is to discern a pattern, the less scrutiny they'll face when taking down accounts that say things they don't like. It also provides cover if there's a big stink and they have to reinstate an account.
- yosito 9y ago
  > I’m wondering what the idiots at Twitter are really doing. Focusing on profit.
  - Rjevski 9y ago
    Profit? Which profit? Not to mention, having spam on the platform isn’t really a good strategy for profit anyway.
- nothis 9y ago
  The curves of false-acceptance vs false-rejection rates usually overlap, even in their optimum. I do not envy a billion-user-level website like Twitter having to deal with this. Automation is probably still better than trying to do this manually and failing even more? Who knows, though.
- komali2 9y ago
  Hold on, I've reported multiple extraordinarily obvious spam rings before, with accounts as old as 2013, and I've even kicked up a stink here when Twitter employees show up, and I was told "bots don't violate the TOS." I just checked, it's still there https://mobile.twitter.com/ksfAKBARI https://mobile.twitter.com/ksfAKBARI check followers/following for a massive ring of obvious spam.
  - Rjevski 9y ago
    Could everyone who has a Twitter account report some of those? Just to see if a pile of reports from mostly influential accounts (we’re on HN after all) would have any effect. Here’s a screenshot of the account just in case this actually works: https://i.imgur.com/xNviClq.png https://i.imgur.com/xNviClq.png
  - joncrane 9y ago
    I read a few of the tweets and it's all gibberish. What is the purpose of such a bot? Is the purpose being accomplished?
    - Rjevski 9y ago
      To inflate some other account's (either spam bot, or someone who buys fake followers) followers and make them look legitimate. However this particular account is a spam bot as it occasionally tweets financial frauds such as "yes loans any good (link: yes-loans-any-good.txtloanltd.com) yes-loans-any-good.txtloanltd.com #no fax online loans".
  - dawnerd 9y ago
    It took a lot of effort to get twitter to do something about the crypto spam accounts targeting elon musk. SO obvious yet none of their systems seemed to catch it.
    - komali2 9y ago
      They're doing something about it? I saw some yesterday.
- jimnotgym 9y ago
  Is spam a problem for Twitter users? It is bots and the algorithmic timeline (which Twitter spam with lots of people i don't follow) that ruined it for me. The bot issue seems simpler to solve than spam, (a Turing test?) and I can only think that Twitter feel the bots will one day make them profitable.
overcast 9y ago
I'm saying it again, don't build a business based on someone else's data. At any point it could disappear, along with you.
- FLUX-YOU 9y ago
  I wonder how many companies have had their firehose dry up but then just generated data to get a bit of extra cash before closing down. Seems like you could train an AI model to do that if you have enough historical data saved.
- modsec 9y ago
  What's a good alternative you would suggest? I often have a similar problem and the fact is that most users hang out on platforms that suck like Twitter, Facebook, etc. If I build my business on a decentralized platform like blockchain etc. I immediately lose 90% or even more of my target audience. If I build my business on my own datacenter the cost and maintenance involved is staggeringly high. Do you have a reasonable alternative that would allow small players like us to host large volumes of data (say about 1 TB to 2 TB) while completely controlling the ownership of the data?
  - twblalock 9y ago
    Use cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure. Or pay to be colocated in a datacenter -- you don't need to build one. Back up your databases somewhere that only you control. You'll have to hire some engineers to maintain this, but it won't be as bad as building a datacenter. And it's what you'll need to do to avoid being a sharecropper on someone else's platform.
    - pjc50 9y ago
      > You'll have to hire some engineers to maintain this That rules out small projects and requires monetization.
  - iuguy 9y ago
    They had, in their own words hundreds of followers. At the time of this comment, the fediverse has about 1.2 million accounts. It's not that hard to get hundreds of followers there.
jwilk 9y ago
"The BlockChain"? What's that?
- moocowtruck 9y ago
  no one knows
modbait 9y ago
Always figured that you get what you pay for, but in fact, Twitter/Facebook/Google aren't nearly that reliable in the long term.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  A remarkably poor hueristic. Though you should carefully examine just that.
enzanki_ars 9y ago
I would assume Twitter suspended the account due to the rate of posts. Granted, you are allowed 2400 tweets per day, [1] so the account should not have had any issues.... [1]: https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-limits https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-limit...
- peterwwillis 9y ago
  I think the image-post all-caps multi-level text followed by a link with just a number at the end might have been spammy looking to a crap machine learning algorithm
  - insensible 9y ago
    Asimov's zeroth Law of Robotics: > A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm. Causing data loss from a poorly-trained robot's incorrect call is unacceptable. Fix your bits, Twitter.
  - edent 9y ago
    That's possible. We get the text from Google's OCR product - and a lot of benches are in all caps. We could try to shift it all to sentence case, but that might lose the meaning of proper nouns. Thanks for the suggestion though, that's the first thing which has made sense about the banning.
- Rjevski 9y ago
  They should actually put that report button to good use and take that into account when suspending users. A high number of tweeets seen by a lot of active followers and not being reported is actually a very good signal the account is not spamming.
- edent 9y ago
  We don't get anywhere near that. On a good day we might get 100.
- Bukhmanizer 9y ago
  My guess would be the source of posts. Looks like they post from "Twitter for Google TV" and "edent's tweeting robot", so they're probably outliers due to the volume of posts and where the posts are coming from. That combined with the characteristics of the text probably triggered the algorithm. That being said, it's unfortunate that this happened to them, the lack of manual review when kinds of things go wrong is shocking.
parliament32 9y ago
An "open data project" that stores all of its data on Twitter? Not that Twitter's in the right here, but this seems like a bad move...
- WillAbides 9y ago
  I don't think they store all their data on twitter. If they did, they probably wouldn't have this file in their repo: https://github.com/edent/openbenches/blob/master/database/database%20structure.sql https://github.com/edent/openbenches/blob/master/database/da...
- edent 9y ago
  We don't. We syndicate to Twitter. That's where we get the most new users. All the data is on openbenches.org and GitHub.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
thaumaturgy 9y ago
So what's the current feeling on HN towards stories like this one? They seem fairly repetitive and uninteresting: users use something with no customer service, automated system goes haywire and bans/blocks/disables/inconveniences their account, the only way they have to get it resolved is to make some noise about it, they then return to using the service, nothing changes. At this point I'm tempted to flag stories like this one that don't have some kind of new angle or widespread interest, but thought I'd see how others are feeling about it first.
- purple-again 9y ago
  I would agree with you and I usually feel the same way, however this particular instance makes sense as in fact his users never returned and hes appealing to those people to let them know. If I was following him, I doubt I would even notice the benches go missing from my feed. Now as for its interest to HN...I thought it was an interesting thing they are doing and I'm glad that I know it exists now.
- gnicholas 9y ago
  I find this interesting because it helps me to better understand how to get support/results from one of the many popular systems that offer very little.
- extralego 9y ago
  I don’t understand the reason for flagging it. I get the impression that you are flagging it for not being novel or unique. I can relate, but that is concerning in itself. The general concern here could not be anymore relevant, and discounting that merely because it lacks novelty seems at least decadent and at most snobery. Without even taking a stance on the issue being discussed, I think we can all agree that these sorts of issues that come up in our society and seem to affect all of us are in our noblest interests to take concern with. I say we let these articles live.
  - thaumaturgy 9y ago
    The danger with low-effort topics like this is that they can take over a site (see e.g. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tscc3e5eujrsEeFN4/well-kept-gardens-die-by-pacifism https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tscc3e5eujrsEeFN4/well-kept-...). At a guess, there've been several hundred submissions like this to HN over the years, and yet this is an approach to business that established companies and startups alike continue to follow. There's no sign that any of this noise is changing the actual business practices at all, and the problem is common enough that the /r/videos subreddit has had a "YouTube Drama" tag for certain videos for quite a while now. But, okay. It looks like the general opinion is that it would be inappropriate to flag them.
ryandrake 9y ago
I can almost buy the need to have automated account suspensions, but shouldn’t the appeal at least be human reviewed? When your appeal logic is: if (true) { deny_appeal(); } ...it might give people the impression that there’s nobody behind the wheel. I guess this is what “building services that scale” means.
- ManFromUranus 9y ago
  Twitters bot detection "algorithm" is: For 1 to accounts do ban account() A bot will not appeal the ban, while human will appeal!
peterwwillis 9y ago
Unrelated: Openbenches, you don't have a single picture of the greatest benches in America? http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/IMG_0841.jpg http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/...
- cwmma 9y ago
  I think you are confusing it with this bench https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/jamacia-pond-bench https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/jamacia-pond-bench
- edent 9y ago
  Haha! If you can take a photo and upload it, we'll gladly put it on the map.
blklivesmatter 9y ago
Please leave twitter asap This crazyness is just not even started yet!
jonathankoren 9y ago
Same thing happened with my @busplungebot . All it did was post articles where about about buses plunging off cliffs have occurred. Hell, I think I was the only follower. I haven’t even bothered to log in and fix it.
cwmma 9y ago
I run a bot swarm that tweets transit delays in Boston and this has been affecting some of the most prolific accounts (i.e. the one that tweets bus delays), that being said, it's been super easy to get them reactivated and I havn't lost any followers.
KarenSatantsby 9y ago
Twitter is depressing now. I mean It is desperate and wholly unsatisfying. - I get the funny stuff from Reddit and my breaking news from the New York Times so other than that it is just like finding a dead baby bird on the side walk. That is the way I feel when I open twitter.com
gesman 9y ago
Another casualty of betting business on someone else's platform. USE someone else's platforms for what they're good at - gather leads and connections and steering them to the platform you own. OWN your data.
- hk__2 9y ago
  They do own their data; that doesn’t change anything to the problem of Twitter closing their account. They use it as a communication medium; not a storage one.
- ghostly_s 9y ago
  Please read the story before commenting next time. They did not build a business on Twitter. It's not even a business, and they were using Twitter for publicity, exactly as intended. Having a major arm of your project's publicity platform wiped out arbitrarily is still shitty, and still Twitter's fault.
_bxg1 9y ago
A similar thing happened to a much bigger, also innocent, account recently: https://kotaku.com/nintendo-fan-account-flagged-on-twitter-for-image-of-ma-1824999104 https://kotaku.com/nintendo-fan-account-flagged-on-twitter-f...
AlphaWeaver 9y ago
There's a fair bit of criticism for relying too much on Twitter in this thread, but I think the article brings up a good point: >Yes, I know. We should redecentralize and put our content on Mastodon, or the BlockChain, or some other convoluted platform which has no users. But that’s just not practical for a small project. We have limited technical resources and have to go to where the people are. Despite there being better technical options, those options can't be considered just on their technical merits... User adoption is also crucial.
- jordigh 9y ago
  User adoption on Mastodon can be pretty big depending on the project. Look at the number of followers F-Droid has on Mastodon compared to Twitter. https://mastodon.technology/@fdroidorg https://mastodon.technology/@fdroidorg https://twitter.com/fdroidorg https://twitter.com/fdroidorg
  - stingraycharles 9y ago
    I know of absolutely no people that use Mastadon. There might be a niche somewhere that uses it, but I can’t help to think that it would hurt rather than help any hobby project to choose Mastadon over Twitter.
    - ColinWright 9y ago
      Firstly, there's no reason to choose only one and not the other. Tweeting on Twitter and tooting on Mastodon can be done with a single command once you've set it up. I'd've thought that was a no brainer. Secondly, I use Mastodon, and I'm on an instance with just over 1000 users. There are over 150K users on the main instance.
      - fao_ 9y ago
        > Secondly, I use Mastodon, and I'm on an instance with just over 1000 users. There are over 150K users on the main instance. For most people I know and follow, that's like, the low bar of twitter follower counts.
gojomo 9y ago
Seems like Twitter's 'automated systems' are to incrementally ban every account, for unspecified reasons, then re-instate those who figure out how to object. (Of course, if this were a conscious strategy, they'd probably be better about not destroying following/follower state through a cycle.)
TekMol 9y ago
What was actually lost? Aren't followers just a number? Did they interact with you in any meaningful way? Did they contribute to the project? My experience is that even thousands of Twitter followers amount to no real contribution to anything. Anybody here with a different experience?
DoreenMichele 9y ago
Despite the promises, the followers never returned. We only had a few hundred, not bad for a parochial project on the psychogeography of memorials, but now we had zero. They currently have 396, including me.
- martin-adams 9y ago
  Maybe you were looking at the following, not the followers. I see 222 followers.
  - DoreenMichele 9y ago
    No. It's up to 427 currently: OpenBenches.org @openbenches Made with in Oxford by @edent and @summerbeth openbenches.org 393 Following 427 Followers
    - martin-adams 9y ago
      Very strange, I now see 396 following and 257 followers. Social blade confirms the follower number too. I wonder if there's some Twitter caching going on.
      - DoreenMichele 9y ago
        No clue, though the count I currently see is 458, fwiw.
ReedJessen 9y ago
If I was looking for a sneaky way to get huge number of followers, this kind of sob story might be the way to do it. ;)

235 points by edent 9y ago

I love it how they have “automated systems that remove spam” that somehow remove innocent accounts like this one but completely fail to remove blatantly obvious spam. I don’t expect the system to be bulletproof and remove advanced spam rings, but when obvious spam is allowed to stay on the platform I’m wondering what the idiots at Twitter are really doing.

pound 9y ago
re: "idiots at Twitter" - It's always nice to encounter someone smart on internet.
- Rjevski 9y ago
  I assume this is sarcasm, so I’d like to point out that I don’t consider myself smarter than anyone else or anything - I say idiots simply because there’s no excuse where blatantly obvious spam (for example the crypto currency scam replies in response to famous accounts like Elon Musk) isn’t deleted automatically.
  - pound 9y ago
    If you know how to reliably solve that easy problem I'm pretty sure they're hiring
    - ksenzee 9y ago
      Solving that particular problem is not hard: trash any reply to a celebrity or viral tweet that includes a link and gets reported x times. There was a good Twitter thread on this recently, pointing out that we look for complicated solutions when simple ones would do. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/987602838594445312.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/987602838594445312.html
      - empath75 9y ago
        If you’re relying on reports that can be gamed.
        Rjevski 9y ago
        > Automated systems can and will be gamed as well. Taking an user’s reputation, account lifetime, reputation of their followers, etc (so for example, a report from a new account has less weight than an established account with a good history) will sort that out. And when everything else fails, a proper appeals system where you talk to humans will solve this problem once and for all. False positives and abuse are bound to happen eventually, but they’re tolerable as long as you have a proper appeals process to deal with them.
      - JoshTriplett 9y ago
        > Solving that particular problem is not hard: trash any reply to a celebrity or viral tweet that includes a link and gets reported x times. That's trivial to abuse, given a group of accounts filing false reports. That's not a hypothetical; as an example, Facebook's reporting functionality has been abused to attack people's accounts as part of various hate campaigns.
    - Rjevski 9y ago
      I’m sure their engineers (if they still have any - I haven’t seen any innovation from Twitter in a long time) are more than capable of fixing this if management lets them. Hiring more engineers isn’t going to solve it. Management and product is where the real problem is IMO.
    - A2017U1 9y ago
      Automatically flag any account making a reply with the same name or same picture. It's incredibly simple yet they don't do it.
- fortythirteen 9y ago
  To be fair, if the only thing they're geniuses as is making a money pit look attractive to investors.
- FRex 9y ago
  I once wanted to have a Twitter account without a phone number attached to it. It got banned within 5 minutes of being created, I didn't use Tor, proxy or anything shady, a normal Chrome browser and a normal gmail account. All I did was Tweet once (their own localized hell world tweet where I didn't even fill in the text). Reason was something that amounted to breaking their ToS via 'automated use' or some shit. Of course if I were to provide my mobile number it'd get instantly unlocked, 0 human oversight on that too. Opening a support ticket sent me their automated crap email saying the same thing and asking for phone number again to instantly get my 10 minutes old account unlocked. I never heard from a human. They reap what they sow. Edit: and by 'without a phone number' I mean I didn't fill it in when creating the account (I don't even remember if it asked there but I somehow got an account open without one), just out of principle of not wanting to give any more information than I need to any service I use. And of course I didn't divulge it after that borderline ransomware situation and my opinion of Twitter has dropped (generously speaking..). It was also my only ever attempt at having a Twitter account, not a secondary account or something like that. I also have a static Polish IP for years now, no other service ever 'caught' me for being a bot, it was in an up to date Chrome on Windows 10, etc.
fortythirteen 9y ago
It all makes sense when you realize that they're lying and their "automated system" is a bunch of low level contractors.
- Rjevski 9y ago
  Most likely, but then I wonder, what do their 1k-5k (according to CrunchBase) employees really do? A simple spam flagging system (that’ll take care of the lowest hanging fruit aka very obvious spam) can be built even by a single engineer.
  - eli 9y ago
    How would that be different from the existing spam flagging system?
    - Rjevski 9y ago
      Well the existing system doesn’t seem to be working right. Blatantly obvious spam is allowed to remain, just see the spam replies to any big account’s tweets or spam on certain popular hashtags.
      - eli 9y ago
        Or the existing system works as designed but your suggestion of a "simple spam flagging system that could be written by one engineer" is not a sufficient solution. (And keep in mind that any anti-spam tools will be definitely abused be trolls and other malicious actors to harass innocent users)
  - modsec 9y ago
    I see comments like this coming up on Hacker News almost every month and I tend to think that people who make these comments are either too young and/or have not worked for a mid-sized to a large company. If you have worked in any company that deals with internet-facing traffic serving the size of audience that Twitter does, it should be obvious that 1k employees is nothing if you want to have all the necessary teams you need to keep the business running, for example, software engineering, software support, hardware engineering, hardware support, network engineering, software engineering, HR, finance, legal, PR, management, IT department, etc. A company of this scale is not just code and raw technical skills. There are many nuances that you need to appreciate before you understand why it involves 1k-5k employees.
modsec 9y ago
> idiots at Twitter A constructive comment would have been to point us at good spam filters that are very good at not allowing obvious spam so that we do not make the same mistake that Twitter did and be labelled as "idiots" by the likes of you on the Internet.
- Rjevski 9y ago
  Any of the open-source email spam filters? Not saying they’re excellent by any means but they’d at least take care of the most obvious spam there is. False positives can be dealt with appeals - allow people to actually appeal the decision and get a human to review it. I’d take the occasional false positive with a proper appeals system any day over the current cesspool that is Twitter.
  - modsec 9y ago
    Like what? SpamAssassin? You would be surprised how much obvious spam gets through it in the face of the kind of spam onslaught that goes on in the real world today. Seriously, this problem is not as easy to solve for machines as you think it is.
    - kaoD 9y ago
      Well, they're Twitter. How does Google filter all my Gmail spam? So far I've had one or two emails go through in all these years and my account is available in several leaks, receiving tens of spam mails a day. And email seems like a harder place to police, being decentralized. These guys control the gateway to the service!
- crankylinuxuser 9y ago
  Or, you can spend human time to review a decision like "Delete account with known good history", rather than the current SV trend of 'automate it, fuck it, who cares? We'll wait until someone complains on HN or Reddit' The first rule is you don't delete user data without consent. The second rule, is you dont delete user data without consent! And yes, I work in the industry. Bad shit happens, and data can be lost. But trusting some automated 'spam detection algo' and making actionable, irrecoverable decisions on fuzzy math is completely idiotic, boneheaded, and fucking stupid! If you're in that product team, you deserve every shred of scorn you're getting.
ropeadopepope 9y ago
> I’m wondering what the idiots at Twitter are really doing. What if they're not idiots? What if that system is working exactly as intended?
- Rjevski 9y ago
  Whoever designed how this system is supposed to work (as in, allow the spam to remain) is still an idiot in my view. Granted, I’m sure they have an agenda to justify this (aka boost user numbers as much as possible, even if all of them are bots) but as a user I don’t care - I see spam on the platform and I call them out for it.
  - ropeadopepope 9y ago
    > Whoever designed how this system is supposed to work (as in, allow the spam to remain) is still an idiot in my view Why? If you don't know what the goal is, how can you judge the results? Just because you don't care for the result doesn't make the person who designed the system an idiot. It makes you an idiot for continuing to use a system you hate.
    - Rjevski 9y ago
      I never said I used the system. I deleted my account in 2013 when they started making the platform worse and worse with every “upgrade”. I loved Twitter and I wish they get their stuff together and make it enjoyable again, but I’m not expecting anything anymore. They’re most likely going to go down the same way Yahoo did.
      - ropeadopepope 9y ago
        > They’re most likely going to go down the same way Yahoo did. Unlikely. Yahoo actually had to make a profit. In 12 years, Twitter has only reported 1 profitable quarter. And yet, somebody (or somebodies) keep forking over billions of dollars to keep twitter up and running. Whatever their goal is, making money isn't it. My guess is their goal is the same as the major media outlets: to control the flow of information. It's a lot easier to do that without scrutiny if the tools appear to kick people off at random. The harder it is to discern a pattern, the less scrutiny they'll face when taking down accounts that say things they don't like. It also provides cover if there's a big stink and they have to reinstate an account.
yosito 9y ago
> I’m wondering what the idiots at Twitter are really doing. Focusing on profit.
- Rjevski 9y ago
  Profit? Which profit? Not to mention, having spam on the platform isn’t really a good strategy for profit anyway.
nothis 9y ago
The curves of false-acceptance vs false-rejection rates usually overlap, even in their optimum. I do not envy a billion-user-level website like Twitter having to deal with this. Automation is probably still better than trying to do this manually and failing even more? Who knows, though.
komali2 9y ago
Hold on, I've reported multiple extraordinarily obvious spam rings before, with accounts as old as 2013, and I've even kicked up a stink here when Twitter employees show up, and I was told "bots don't violate the TOS." I just checked, it's still there https://mobile.twitter.com/ksfAKBARI https://mobile.twitter.com/ksfAKBARI check followers/following for a massive ring of obvious spam.
- Rjevski 9y ago
  Could everyone who has a Twitter account report some of those? Just to see if a pile of reports from mostly influential accounts (we’re on HN after all) would have any effect. Here’s a screenshot of the account just in case this actually works: https://i.imgur.com/xNviClq.png https://i.imgur.com/xNviClq.png
- joncrane 9y ago
  I read a few of the tweets and it's all gibberish. What is the purpose of such a bot? Is the purpose being accomplished?
  - Rjevski 9y ago
    To inflate some other account's (either spam bot, or someone who buys fake followers) followers and make them look legitimate. However this particular account is a spam bot as it occasionally tweets financial frauds such as "yes loans any good (link: yes-loans-any-good.txtloanltd.com) yes-loans-any-good.txtloanltd.com #no fax online loans".
- dawnerd 9y ago
  It took a lot of effort to get twitter to do something about the crypto spam accounts targeting elon musk. SO obvious yet none of their systems seemed to catch it.
  - komali2 9y ago
    They're doing something about it? I saw some yesterday.
jimnotgym 9y ago
Is spam a problem for Twitter users? It is bots and the algorithmic timeline (which Twitter spam with lots of people i don't follow) that ruined it for me. The bot issue seems simpler to solve than spam, (a Turing test?) and I can only think that Twitter feel the bots will one day make them profitable.

overcast 9y ago

I'm saying it again, don't build a business based on someone else's data. At any point it could disappear, along with you.

FLUX-YOU 9y ago
I wonder how many companies have had their firehose dry up but then just generated data to get a bit of extra cash before closing down. Seems like you could train an AI model to do that if you have enough historical data saved.
modsec 9y ago
What's a good alternative you would suggest? I often have a similar problem and the fact is that most users hang out on platforms that suck like Twitter, Facebook, etc. If I build my business on a decentralized platform like blockchain etc. I immediately lose 90% or even more of my target audience. If I build my business on my own datacenter the cost and maintenance involved is staggeringly high. Do you have a reasonable alternative that would allow small players like us to host large volumes of data (say about 1 TB to 2 TB) while completely controlling the ownership of the data?
- twblalock 9y ago
  Use cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure. Or pay to be colocated in a datacenter -- you don't need to build one. Back up your databases somewhere that only you control. You'll have to hire some engineers to maintain this, but it won't be as bad as building a datacenter. And it's what you'll need to do to avoid being a sharecropper on someone else's platform.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    > You'll have to hire some engineers to maintain this That rules out small projects and requires monetization.
- iuguy 9y ago
  They had, in their own words hundreds of followers. At the time of this comment, the fediverse has about 1.2 million accounts. It's not that hard to get hundreds of followers there.

jwilk 9y ago

"The BlockChain"? What's that?

moocowtruck 9y ago
no one knows

modbait 9y ago

Always figured that you get what you pay for, but in fact, Twitter/Facebook/Google aren't nearly that reliable in the long term.

dredmorbius 9y ago
A remarkably poor hueristic. Though you should carefully examine just that.

enzanki_ars 9y ago

I would assume Twitter suspended the account due to the rate of posts. Granted, you are allowed 2400 tweets per day, [1] so the account should not have had any issues.... [1]: https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-limits https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-limit...

peterwwillis 9y ago
I think the image-post all-caps multi-level text followed by a link with just a number at the end might have been spammy looking to a crap machine learning algorithm
- insensible 9y ago
  Asimov's zeroth Law of Robotics: > A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm. Causing data loss from a poorly-trained robot's incorrect call is unacceptable. Fix your bits, Twitter.
- edent 9y ago
  That's possible. We get the text from Google's OCR product - and a lot of benches are in all caps. We could try to shift it all to sentence case, but that might lose the meaning of proper nouns. Thanks for the suggestion though, that's the first thing which has made sense about the banning.
Rjevski 9y ago
They should actually put that report button to good use and take that into account when suspending users. A high number of tweeets seen by a lot of active followers and not being reported is actually a very good signal the account is not spamming.
edent 9y ago
We don't get anywhere near that. On a good day we might get 100.
Bukhmanizer 9y ago
My guess would be the source of posts. Looks like they post from "Twitter for Google TV" and "edent's tweeting robot", so they're probably outliers due to the volume of posts and where the posts are coming from. That combined with the characteristics of the text probably triggered the algorithm. That being said, it's unfortunate that this happened to them, the lack of manual review when kinds of things go wrong is shocking.

parliament32 9y ago

An "open data project" that stores all of its data on Twitter? Not that Twitter's in the right here, but this seems like a bad move...

WillAbides 9y ago
I don't think they store all their data on twitter. If they did, they probably wouldn't have this file in their repo: https://github.com/edent/openbenches/blob/master/database/database%20structure.sql https://github.com/edent/openbenches/blob/master/database/da...
edent 9y ago
We don't. We syndicate to Twitter. That's where we get the most new users. All the data is on openbenches.org and GitHub.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

thaumaturgy 9y ago

So what's the current feeling on HN towards stories like this one? They seem fairly repetitive and uninteresting: users use something with no customer service, automated system goes haywire and bans/blocks/disables/inconveniences their account, the only way they have to get it resolved is to make some noise about it, they then return to using the service, nothing changes. At this point I'm tempted to flag stories like this one that don't have some kind of new angle or widespread interest, but thought I'd see how others are feeling about it first.

purple-again 9y ago
I would agree with you and I usually feel the same way, however this particular instance makes sense as in fact his users never returned and hes appealing to those people to let them know. If I was following him, I doubt I would even notice the benches go missing from my feed. Now as for its interest to HN...I thought it was an interesting thing they are doing and I'm glad that I know it exists now.
gnicholas 9y ago
I find this interesting because it helps me to better understand how to get support/results from one of the many popular systems that offer very little.
extralego 9y ago
I don’t understand the reason for flagging it. I get the impression that you are flagging it for not being novel or unique. I can relate, but that is concerning in itself. The general concern here could not be anymore relevant, and discounting that merely because it lacks novelty seems at least decadent and at most snobery. Without even taking a stance on the issue being discussed, I think we can all agree that these sorts of issues that come up in our society and seem to affect all of us are in our noblest interests to take concern with. I say we let these articles live.
- thaumaturgy 9y ago
  The danger with low-effort topics like this is that they can take over a site (see e.g. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tscc3e5eujrsEeFN4/well-kept-gardens-die-by-pacifism https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tscc3e5eujrsEeFN4/well-kept-...). At a guess, there've been several hundred submissions like this to HN over the years, and yet this is an approach to business that established companies and startups alike continue to follow. There's no sign that any of this noise is changing the actual business practices at all, and the problem is common enough that the /r/videos subreddit has had a "YouTube Drama" tag for certain videos for quite a while now. But, okay. It looks like the general opinion is that it would be inappropriate to flag them.

ryandrake 9y ago

I can almost buy the need to have automated account suspensions, but shouldn’t the appeal at least be human reviewed? When your appeal logic is: if (true) { deny_appeal(); } ...it might give people the impression that there’s nobody behind the wheel. I guess this is what “building services that scale” means.

ManFromUranus 9y ago
Twitters bot detection "algorithm" is: For 1 to accounts do ban account() A bot will not appeal the ban, while human will appeal!

peterwwillis 9y ago

Unrelated: Openbenches, you don't have a single picture of the greatest benches in America? http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/IMG_0841.jpg http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/...

cwmma 9y ago
I think you are confusing it with this bench https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/jamacia-pond-bench https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/jamacia-pond-bench
edent 9y ago
Haha! If you can take a photo and upload it, we'll gladly put it on the map.

blklivesmatter 9y ago

Please leave twitter asap This crazyness is just not even started yet!

jonathankoren 9y ago

Same thing happened with my @busplungebot . All it did was post articles where about about buses plunging off cliffs have occurred. Hell, I think I was the only follower. I haven’t even bothered to log in and fix it.

cwmma 9y ago

I run a bot swarm that tweets transit delays in Boston and this has been affecting some of the most prolific accounts (i.e. the one that tweets bus delays), that being said, it's been super easy to get them reactivated and I havn't lost any followers.

KarenSatantsby 9y ago

Twitter is depressing now. I mean It is desperate and wholly unsatisfying. - I get the funny stuff from Reddit and my breaking news from the New York Times so other than that it is just like finding a dead baby bird on the side walk. That is the way I feel when I open twitter.com

gesman 9y ago

Another casualty of betting business on someone else's platform. USE someone else's platforms for what they're good at - gather leads and connections and steering them to the platform you own. OWN your data.

hk__2 9y ago
They do own their data; that doesn’t change anything to the problem of Twitter closing their account. They use it as a communication medium; not a storage one.
ghostly_s 9y ago
Please read the story before commenting next time. They did not build a business on Twitter. It's not even a business, and they were using Twitter for publicity, exactly as intended. Having a major arm of your project's publicity platform wiped out arbitrarily is still shitty, and still Twitter's fault.

_bxg1 9y ago

A similar thing happened to a much bigger, also innocent, account recently: https://kotaku.com/nintendo-fan-account-flagged-on-twitter-for-image-of-ma-1824999104 https://kotaku.com/nintendo-fan-account-flagged-on-twitter-f...

AlphaWeaver 9y ago

There's a fair bit of criticism for relying too much on Twitter in this thread, but I think the article brings up a good point: >Yes, I know. We should redecentralize and put our content on Mastodon, or the BlockChain, or some other convoluted platform which has no users. But that’s just not practical for a small project. We have limited technical resources and have to go to where the people are. Despite there being better technical options, those options can't be considered just on their technical merits... User adoption is also crucial.

jordigh 9y ago
User adoption on Mastodon can be pretty big depending on the project. Look at the number of followers F-Droid has on Mastodon compared to Twitter. https://mastodon.technology/@fdroidorg https://mastodon.technology/@fdroidorg https://twitter.com/fdroidorg https://twitter.com/fdroidorg
- stingraycharles 9y ago
  I know of absolutely no people that use Mastadon. There might be a niche somewhere that uses it, but I can’t help to think that it would hurt rather than help any hobby project to choose Mastadon over Twitter.
  - ColinWright 9y ago
    Firstly, there's no reason to choose only one and not the other. Tweeting on Twitter and tooting on Mastodon can be done with a single command once you've set it up. I'd've thought that was a no brainer. Secondly, I use Mastodon, and I'm on an instance with just over 1000 users. There are over 150K users on the main instance.
    - fao_ 9y ago
      > Secondly, I use Mastodon, and I'm on an instance with just over 1000 users. There are over 150K users on the main instance. For most people I know and follow, that's like, the low bar of twitter follower counts.

gojomo 9y ago

Seems like Twitter's 'automated systems' are to incrementally ban every account, for unspecified reasons, then re-instate those who figure out how to object. (Of course, if this were a conscious strategy, they'd probably be better about not destroying following/follower state through a cycle.)

TekMol 9y ago

What was actually lost? Aren't followers just a number? Did they interact with you in any meaningful way? Did they contribute to the project? My experience is that even thousands of Twitter followers amount to no real contribution to anything. Anybody here with a different experience?

DoreenMichele 9y ago

Despite the promises, the followers never returned. We only had a few hundred, not bad for a parochial project on the psychogeography of memorials, but now we had zero. They currently have 396, including me.

martin-adams 9y ago
Maybe you were looking at the following, not the followers. I see 222 followers.
- DoreenMichele 9y ago
  No. It's up to 427 currently: OpenBenches.org @openbenches Made with in Oxford by @edent and @summerbeth openbenches.org 393 Following 427 Followers
  - martin-adams 9y ago
    Very strange, I now see 396 following and 257 followers. Social blade confirms the follower number too. I wonder if there's some Twitter caching going on.
    - DoreenMichele 9y ago
      No clue, though the count I currently see is 458, fwiw.

ReedJessen 9y ago

If I was looking for a sneaky way to get huge number of followers, this kind of sob story might be the way to do it. ;)