11 ms·

Twitter rewrites developer policy to better support research and ‘good’ bots

173 points by ajaviaad 7y ago

benologist 7y ago
Hard to believe they won't artificially stifle or prohibit successful use cases, like every other time people built on Twitter. There used to be a whole ecosystem of successful alternate clients, link shorteners, image/video hosting, tweet analytics and other software and it all got deliberately destroyed as Twitter wanted to appropriate the engagement those developers had. https://www.accuracast.com/news/social-media-7471/twitter-bans-third-party-apps/ https://www.accuracast.com/news/social-media-7471/twitter-ba... > In effect ad networks like ‘Sponsored Tweets’ and ‘Ad.ly’ will be discontinued. https://thenextweb.com/twitter/2012/08/17/twitter-4/ https://thenextweb.com/twitter/2012/08/17/twitter-4/ > These changes effectively kill off the growth of the third-party client ecosystem as we know it.
zacksinclair 7y ago
Seems like we're going full circle with Twitter now.
aquova 7y ago
While I hope this is a step in the right direction, I'm not too wowed by this new policy. The term "good bot" is incredibly vague, and I wasn't able to find a much better definition within the policy change itself. The limitations they want to set on bots aren't too limiting either, basically if you pinky swear to behave, you're a good bot. They mention things like no bulk following or spam posting content, but surely these things could be limited in some way by their API, with whitelisted exemptions for the academic groups they want to target? I also find fault with this statement from the article: > Going forward, developers must specify if they’re operating a bot account, what the account is, and who is behind it. This way, explains Twitter, “it’s easier for everyone on Twitter to know what’s a bot – and what’s not.” It may be known to Twitter who is and isn't a bot, but unless something has changed, there is no public facing way to know if an account is a bot. I have never understood this. Sites like Mastodon and Discord clearly label bot accounts, but Twitter has never done so. They are fine labeling accounts arbitrarily as 'verified', but not clearly identifying bots. This would be a great step forward if they want to redefine bot behavior on the site.
- sneak 7y ago
  I personally object to these sorts of editorial labels. Bots are operated by humans; these are human accounts. They’re just alts. They should not be treated differently. There’s no such thing as a “bot post”: just human beings using different types of software to author posts. Literally every single “bot post” was posted by a real person. That person’s posts should not be segregated as a result of their client software.
  - wolco 7y ago
    I will go further. If the thought was orginal and came from the bot we should not treat it's message as second class.
  - wpietri 7y ago
    As a person who runs a bot (@sfships) as well as a real Twitter account (@williampietri), I strongly disagree. It's like saying that there's no difference between talking to the store manager and standing next to an in-store TV running a commercial on a loop. Twitter is mainly about human-to-human connection, and that should be the presumption for any account one comes across. Other uses should be obvious, or at least declared.
    - inetknght 7y ago
      > I strongly disagree. It's like saying that there's no difference between talking to the store manager and standing next to an in-store TV running a commercial on a loop. No. The commercial in a loop is clearly recognized as such. Twitter is more like the difference between talking to the store manager on the phone and talking to a voice script on the phone which claims to be the store manager. Good luck getting your problem resolved with the voice script. Some voice scripts are good enough that some people can't tell the difference between it. And that's arguably fine! If you can't tell the difference, then is there a problem? But enter in the poor soul who can't get that voice script to go off script to solve that customer's problem. Or, nefariously, the voice script that can cause problems en masse because there isn't a human in the loop, or even if there is then the human simply doesn't understand that they're causing problems.
allovernow 7y ago
They're just picking winners that align with their own ideology at this point. The dangers of authoritarianism are latent in any power structure - whether government, corporate, or other. This is bad for society.
- rhizome 7y ago
  >They're just picking winners that align with their own ideology at this point Which is why Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn and all of them are actually publishers, akin to the Washington Times or Fox News, and don't (currently) deserve §230 protection.
  - gizmo385 7y ago
    I mean at a certain point, does a difference in volume not become a difference in kind? Washington Times and Fox News are effectively "whitelisting" the content that goes onto their sites, whereas the stance that Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn are taking here is a blacklist. Those are different things.
    - rhizome 7y ago
      >does a difference in volume not become a difference in kind? Why should it? They built the firehose, they can build the valves. It's not reasonable to argue, "whoopsy, too hard to do now!" when moderation has been around for DECADES and which therefore they consciously decided not to implement anywhere along the line. Even if Zuckerberg was already in over his head by that point, Thiel knew about this stuff. So did Parker. FB pays smart people who know about this stuff, too, they're just presumably prevented from implementing it. This really is "a steering wheel that doesn't fly off while you're driving" situation, but FB refuses to secure steering wheels until they can figure out a way to do it without humans. It's their problem if blacklists don't work. Why can't (can't) they use whitelists if that's the sure-fire solution? They can, they just don't want to. Look how many teeth had to be pulled just to get attribution on ads that were proven to be problematic.
    - leggomylibro 7y ago
QuinnyPig 7y ago
"Twitter rewrites developer policy" is a frequent enough occurrence that I'd be highly reluctant to build anything material on top of the ever-shifting sands that comprise their APIs.
- penagwin 7y ago
  > I'd be reluctant to use their API's. I'm not sure what you mean - what choice do you have? You're either building a twitter bot, or you aren't and it doesn't matter? Also this isn't much (if any?) of an API change, it's a policy change. And even then it doesn't look like it should negatively affect you unless you were doing something nefarious already.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - wpietri 7y ago
    The choice is of what to do with one's time. If Twitter had been a reliable partner to developers, more people would make things for it.
    - penagwin 7y ago
      Fair enough, that's a good point. Now that you mention it, a bot-oriented twitter clone might be interesting...
  - uk_programmer 7y ago
    > I'm not sure what you mean - what choice do you have? I can choose not to interact with their platform at all. I can also find other ways of interacting with them in other ways (scraping or headless browser automation). > Also this isn't much (if any?) of an API change, it's a policy change. And even then it doesn't look like it should negatively affect you unless you were doing something nefarious already. If you are investing time and effort into an endeavour (whatever it is) it helps to know whether ground is likely to disappear from under you. Microsoft while many people don't like them have kept many ancient APIs working e.g. We have code from 2005 that still works with the latest .NET Runtime with rather minimal changes. This provides you with confidence that going forward you won't face a lot of churn. Policies while they aren't APIs are important in that they are both clear, applied fairly and don't change on a whim. A lot of people are sceptical that Twitter will do any of those based on previous behaviour.
dtrailin 7y ago
Lots of those that build on the Twitter platform gets burned at some point. They have shown not themselves to be a reliable partner. Any company doing social media management at some point gets hurt by changing APIs and increasing fees, sometimes causing fatal damage to their business.
- TekMol 7y ago
  Now that scraping has been deemed legal by the highest curts, how can anybody still get burned by API fees?
  - ceejayoz 7y ago
    "Legal" and "won't be interfered with" are not the same thing. That it's legal to scrape doesn't mean they can't put captchas, IP blocks, etc. in your way. Scraping doesn't really help when publishing tweets, either.
    - colejohnson66 7y ago
      I thought the point of the LinkedIn lawsuit was that they were trying to stop them from scraping?
      - ceejayoz 7y ago
        LinkedIn was trying to do so via legal measures (specifically, alleging violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in a C&D letter).
  - godzillabrennus 7y ago
    Scraping, while legal now, is still not free. A scrape does not give you the delta between two points in time without a completely new scrape. You cannot economically sustainably scrape the entirety of a large site like Twitter. If I’m wrong I’d love to learn from someone smarter than me. Even google doesn’t scrape the entire web every day.
dickjocke 7y ago
Has anyone ever been refused a developer account? I wanted to write some scraper and did the form, but they rejected, told me in the email there was no appeal, and I guess that's it?
- riffic 7y ago
  > Has anyone ever been refused a developer account? https://twitter.com/search?q=twitter%20denied%20access%20API&src=typed_query https://twitter.com/search?q=twitter%20denied%20access%20API...
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  Yes. I got rejected because their email asking for more info went to spam, and that rejection was final, with no appeal permitted. I get a final rejection after several rounds, but the very first time? Because of non-response? Ooof. Luckily, this was just on my personal account, not for work.
  - dickjocke 7y ago
    Actually, yes I recall now this is exactly what happened to me! I applied and forgot about it, assuming it didn't matter to them when I responded. What a bummer
TheSwordsman 7y ago
The issue I see is that it limits the usage to those associated with Academic Institutions. What if you're a data scientist, or an interested person, not working in Academia? Any research you'd want to do and publish isn't good enough, unrelated to the research itself? Seems unfortunate.
- wpietri 7y ago
  From their perspective, it's a way of offloading the otherwise large amount of work needed to evaluate a given researcher. Universities have reputations to protect, and so have things like deans and provosts and IRBs. Whereas any random interested person could be the next Cambridge Analytica. So like so much regulation, it's unfortunate but made necessary by jerks.
- scarejunba 7y ago
  That's life, my man. If you think you're going to get the same access as Raj Chetty is, you're in for a rude surprise. The society of academia is built on trust and since people abhor providing information, academics who have other means of demonstrating trustworthiness will be the ones with access. This is true of everything from IRS data to a startup's data. I worked at a company which shared data extensively with researchers. But we weren't idiots. We gave it to people we trusted. Not every clown claiming to be an independent researcher. That's just sensible.
- speedplane 7y ago
  > The issue I see is that it limits the usage to those associated with Academic Institutions. What if you're a data scientist, or an interested person, not working in Academia? Any research you'd want to do and publish isn't good enough, unrelated to the research itself? Seems unfortunate. Today, data is gold. Companies may give it to academic institutions for free, but that's mostly because they hope the academics will publish their work and cite to the original source data, effectively free marketing.
GrumpyNl 7y ago
Had to look up how many engineers they have, around 4000. That's a lot.
cfv 7y ago
As long as they stop leaving apps dead on the water whenever they decide to maybe develop something remotely related, as has happened several times in the past, then I guess this is good? My previous exp with them isn't super encouraging unfortunately.
- rhizome 7y ago
  This could very well be a "they let Jack remain CEO" dangle, so I'm going to be waiting for another shoe to drop. People will jump on it right away and one of those people will be the first to get burned by whatever develops (and I'm pretty sure there will be burning in the future), and we'll hear about it then. That's the point at which I'll decide to participate or not.
MrGilbert 7y ago
I had a bot once, which would tweet a single word from the 300k most used words in German every 15 minutes (there is a corpus for that). The bot even had "Bot" in it's name. It got striked several times by Twitter because of "hate-speech". Yes, the words were unfiltered - of course. That's language. The longest strike lasted for 5 days. It goes without saying that I disputed every single strike to no avail. I finally took the bot down.
- lucasmullens 7y ago
  I mean, in German you can cram a pretty large amount of hateful information into a single word, since many words are a combination of words. I'd be curious to see what specifically was flagged.
  - MrGilbert 7y ago
    Well, mostly related to 1933 - 1945 references, if I recall it correct. Basically the "N-Word"-category, but related to jewish people. I think one tweet also said "Judenvernichtung" ("extermination of the Jews"). So, yeah, in hindsight, I should have modified the corpus. But at that time, around 2017, I was pretty angry at how Twitter handled these strikes. P.S.: The account is still online and has 775 followers. Maybe I should revive it in a more "harmless" way. It was fun.
    - lopmotr 7y ago
      If your intent was to show the most commonly used German words, then modifying the corpus for political or rule-breaking reasons kind of takes away its value, doesn't it? Twitter just isn't a place that tolerates all cultures the way an impartial academic would.
      - MrGilbert 7y ago
        Yes, indeed, that was the intention. Also having a long-running kind of „art installation“. End was projected for 2024. I thought about rebuilding it as a website. It could also work if I‘d use the ”fediverse“. Mhm, gets me thinking...
baggachipz 7y ago
Years ago I wrote a bot to correct people's poor grammar (specifically "I could care less"), stayed within the API limits, and clearly labeled the account as a bot. Banned by Twitter within a week. Their policies have always been arbitrary and selective, and this kind of vague language ensures that will continue.
- strbean 7y ago
  That's a semantic error, not a grammar error!
  - dllthomas 7y ago
    I stopped being annoyed by it when I decided it was short for "I could care less, I guess, but only if I tried realllly hard."
    - strbean 7y ago
      Oh hi there!
      - dllthomas 7y ago
        o/
- moeffju 7y ago
  That is pretty spammy and, frankly, obnoxious. Not only is language constantly evolving, chances are that people didn't actually ask to be corrected (using commonly used and understood language), much less by a bot?
  - tyre 7y ago
    > chances are that people didn't actually ask to be corrected If you remove the tweets that are something the parent tweet didn't ask for comment on, there would be nothing left.
minimaxir 7y ago
As someone who has made GPT-2-based Twitter bots, I think the reasonable compromise to the arbitrary app approval process is to allow limited bot access (tweeting only, no replies) through the API without requiring app approval. That would cover the majority of genuine fun bot use cases.
jdivo 7y ago
Bots just need banned or API limited... Twitter needs to be re-humazized
kdamica 7y ago
I run a couple of 'good' bots: https://twitter.com/thehugfairy https://twitter.com/thehugfairy - Sends Twitter hugs. You sign up at hugfairy.com to tell it who to hug. This one get's a lot of use. The website has about 1,500 DAU. https://twitter.com/smithsonianbot https://twitter.com/smithsonianbot - A more recent one, which sends random photos from Smithsonian's Open Access collection. Overall I'm glad to see Twitter clarifying their rules. I've had API keys revoked without warning, my accounts deactivated, etc. Twitter dev support is always nice and I've gotten the bots running again, but it would be great to know in advance how I can avoid getting shut down.
JoeMayoBot 7y ago
I've been supporting their API for several years, with a 3rd party library. It's always been mixed feelings, remembering the early days when the ecosystem was exciting and growing, yet the intermediate years when it felt like developers and businesses that built on their platform were getting screwed. Overall, it would be great if they could figure out how to clean up the bad actors, yet build a thriving platform for innovation - a balance they seem tortured to achieve. While a lot of developers have come and gone, I'm still hoping for better.
homero 7y ago
Never trust Twitter API or waste time developing on it. Many burnt bridges.
justlexi93 7y ago
We need real human customer support and not some automated system based algorithms
spondyl 7y ago
> Twitter says since it introduced a new developer review process in July 2018, it has reviewed over a million developer applications and approved 75%. There is still no re-review process however. I have an original apps.twitter.com account and used the new development experience form with the first few weeks. I essentially requested API access for personal projects and was denied with no substantive explanation. There is a form to submit a platform request hidden away in the support area (literally, it's not even on the page that lists all of the contact forms) but having used it about five times over a number of years has led to no response. I would like to be a developer, contributing to the ecosystem I've been a member of for just over 10 years but Twitter seems to make this exceedingly hard with no recourse available :(
gcc_programmer 7y ago
I know I will be downvoted, but I don't care: why are people using Twitter? To me it's the most vile and disgusting platform: no signal, just noise. On top of that, the people that run it are effectively coming up with arbitrary progressive left-wing policies on restricting free speech: for proof, watch this: https://youtu.be/DZCBRHOg3PQ https://youtu.be/DZCBRHOg3PQ after seeing I realised Twitter/Facebook/Google/Apple are evil corporations taking away your freedom with you cheering to it. Why are you using Twitter's platform? For business? Do you want to make business from Twitter's users which are mind-numbed angry, twitching zombies? Are there no business opportunities elsewhere? Anyone who is doing any sort of business related to social media is wasting their time: it's a broken system that deserves to be boycotted. To anyone who would call me angry: I am saying this so you open your mind about the pointlessness of social media: I dont use it, and I seem to live a nice life, only time I get angry is when I think about social media, like in this post. Oh well, this is HN after all, born and bred in silicon valley where such blasphemy will not be tolerated. But lets see.
anonytrary 7y ago
I don't like the term "good bot" and I really don't like the term "'good' bot", as if bots are always evil. We should just think of them "useful bots", "useless bots", or "malicious bots".

173 points by ajaviaad 7y ago

Hard to believe they won't artificially stifle or prohibit successful use cases, like every other time people built on Twitter. There used to be a whole ecosystem of successful alternate clients, link shorteners, image/video hosting, tweet analytics and other software and it all got deliberately destroyed as Twitter wanted to appropriate the engagement those developers had. https://www.accuracast.com/news/social-media-7471/twitter-bans-third-party-apps/ https://www.accuracast.com/news/social-media-7471/twitter-ba... > In effect ad networks like ‘Sponsored Tweets’ and ‘Ad.ly’ will be discontinued. https://thenextweb.com/twitter/2012/08/17/twitter-4/ https://thenextweb.com/twitter/2012/08/17/twitter-4/ > These changes effectively kill off the growth of the third-party client ecosystem as we know it.

zacksinclair 7y ago

Seems like we're going full circle with Twitter now.

aquova 7y ago

While I hope this is a step in the right direction, I'm not too wowed by this new policy. The term "good bot" is incredibly vague, and I wasn't able to find a much better definition within the policy change itself. The limitations they want to set on bots aren't too limiting either, basically if you pinky swear to behave, you're a good bot. They mention things like no bulk following or spam posting content, but surely these things could be limited in some way by their API, with whitelisted exemptions for the academic groups they want to target? I also find fault with this statement from the article: > Going forward, developers must specify if they’re operating a bot account, what the account is, and who is behind it. This way, explains Twitter, “it’s easier for everyone on Twitter to know what’s a bot – and what’s not.” It may be known to Twitter who is and isn't a bot, but unless something has changed, there is no public facing way to know if an account is a bot. I have never understood this. Sites like Mastodon and Discord clearly label bot accounts, but Twitter has never done so. They are fine labeling accounts arbitrarily as 'verified', but not clearly identifying bots. This would be a great step forward if they want to redefine bot behavior on the site.

sneak 7y ago
I personally object to these sorts of editorial labels. Bots are operated by humans; these are human accounts. They’re just alts. They should not be treated differently. There’s no such thing as a “bot post”: just human beings using different types of software to author posts. Literally every single “bot post” was posted by a real person. That person’s posts should not be segregated as a result of their client software.
- wolco 7y ago
  I will go further. If the thought was orginal and came from the bot we should not treat it's message as second class.
- wpietri 7y ago
  As a person who runs a bot (@sfships) as well as a real Twitter account (@williampietri), I strongly disagree. It's like saying that there's no difference between talking to the store manager and standing next to an in-store TV running a commercial on a loop. Twitter is mainly about human-to-human connection, and that should be the presumption for any account one comes across. Other uses should be obvious, or at least declared.
  - inetknght 7y ago
    > I strongly disagree. It's like saying that there's no difference between talking to the store manager and standing next to an in-store TV running a commercial on a loop. No. The commercial in a loop is clearly recognized as such. Twitter is more like the difference between talking to the store manager on the phone and talking to a voice script on the phone which claims to be the store manager. Good luck getting your problem resolved with the voice script. Some voice scripts are good enough that some people can't tell the difference between it. And that's arguably fine! If you can't tell the difference, then is there a problem? But enter in the poor soul who can't get that voice script to go off script to solve that customer's problem. Or, nefariously, the voice script that can cause problems en masse because there isn't a human in the loop, or even if there is then the human simply doesn't understand that they're causing problems.

allovernow 7y ago

They're just picking winners that align with their own ideology at this point. The dangers of authoritarianism are latent in any power structure - whether government, corporate, or other. This is bad for society.

rhizome 7y ago
>They're just picking winners that align with their own ideology at this point Which is why Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn and all of them are actually publishers, akin to the Washington Times or Fox News, and don't (currently) deserve §230 protection.
- gizmo385 7y ago
  I mean at a certain point, does a difference in volume not become a difference in kind? Washington Times and Fox News are effectively "whitelisting" the content that goes onto their sites, whereas the stance that Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn are taking here is a blacklist. Those are different things.
  - rhizome 7y ago
    >does a difference in volume not become a difference in kind? Why should it? They built the firehose, they can build the valves. It's not reasonable to argue, "whoopsy, too hard to do now!" when moderation has been around for DECADES and which therefore they consciously decided not to implement anywhere along the line. Even if Zuckerberg was already in over his head by that point, Thiel knew about this stuff. So did Parker. FB pays smart people who know about this stuff, too, they're just presumably prevented from implementing it. This really is "a steering wheel that doesn't fly off while you're driving" situation, but FB refuses to secure steering wheels until they can figure out a way to do it without humans. It's their problem if blacklists don't work. Why can't (can't) they use whitelists if that's the sure-fire solution? They can, they just don't want to. Look how many teeth had to be pulled just to get attribution on ads that were proven to be problematic.
  - leggomylibro 7y ago

QuinnyPig 7y ago

"Twitter rewrites developer policy" is a frequent enough occurrence that I'd be highly reluctant to build anything material on top of the ever-shifting sands that comprise their APIs.

penagwin 7y ago
> I'd be reluctant to use their API's. I'm not sure what you mean - what choice do you have? You're either building a twitter bot, or you aren't and it doesn't matter? Also this isn't much (if any?) of an API change, it's a policy change. And even then it doesn't look like it should negatively affect you unless you were doing something nefarious already.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- wpietri 7y ago
  The choice is of what to do with one's time. If Twitter had been a reliable partner to developers, more people would make things for it.
  - penagwin 7y ago
    Fair enough, that's a good point. Now that you mention it, a bot-oriented twitter clone might be interesting...
- uk_programmer 7y ago
  > I'm not sure what you mean - what choice do you have? I can choose not to interact with their platform at all. I can also find other ways of interacting with them in other ways (scraping or headless browser automation). > Also this isn't much (if any?) of an API change, it's a policy change. And even then it doesn't look like it should negatively affect you unless you were doing something nefarious already. If you are investing time and effort into an endeavour (whatever it is) it helps to know whether ground is likely to disappear from under you. Microsoft while many people don't like them have kept many ancient APIs working e.g. We have code from 2005 that still works with the latest .NET Runtime with rather minimal changes. This provides you with confidence that going forward you won't face a lot of churn. Policies while they aren't APIs are important in that they are both clear, applied fairly and don't change on a whim. A lot of people are sceptical that Twitter will do any of those based on previous behaviour.

dtrailin 7y ago

Lots of those that build on the Twitter platform gets burned at some point. They have shown not themselves to be a reliable partner. Any company doing social media management at some point gets hurt by changing APIs and increasing fees, sometimes causing fatal damage to their business.

TekMol 7y ago
Now that scraping has been deemed legal by the highest curts, how can anybody still get burned by API fees?
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  "Legal" and "won't be interfered with" are not the same thing. That it's legal to scrape doesn't mean they can't put captchas, IP blocks, etc. in your way. Scraping doesn't really help when publishing tweets, either.
  - colejohnson66 7y ago
    I thought the point of the LinkedIn lawsuit was that they were trying to stop them from scraping?
    - ceejayoz 7y ago
      LinkedIn was trying to do so via legal measures (specifically, alleging violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in a C&D letter).
- godzillabrennus 7y ago
  Scraping, while legal now, is still not free. A scrape does not give you the delta between two points in time without a completely new scrape. You cannot economically sustainably scrape the entirety of a large site like Twitter. If I’m wrong I’d love to learn from someone smarter than me. Even google doesn’t scrape the entire web every day.

dickjocke 7y ago

Has anyone ever been refused a developer account? I wanted to write some scraper and did the form, but they rejected, told me in the email there was no appeal, and I guess that's it?

riffic 7y ago
> Has anyone ever been refused a developer account? https://twitter.com/search?q=twitter%20denied%20access%20API&src=typed_query https://twitter.com/search?q=twitter%20denied%20access%20API...
ceejayoz 7y ago
Yes. I got rejected because their email asking for more info went to spam, and that rejection was final, with no appeal permitted. I get a final rejection after several rounds, but the very first time? Because of non-response? Ooof. Luckily, this was just on my personal account, not for work.
- dickjocke 7y ago
  Actually, yes I recall now this is exactly what happened to me! I applied and forgot about it, assuming it didn't matter to them when I responded. What a bummer

TheSwordsman 7y ago

The issue I see is that it limits the usage to those associated with Academic Institutions. What if you're a data scientist, or an interested person, not working in Academia? Any research you'd want to do and publish isn't good enough, unrelated to the research itself? Seems unfortunate.

wpietri 7y ago
From their perspective, it's a way of offloading the otherwise large amount of work needed to evaluate a given researcher. Universities have reputations to protect, and so have things like deans and provosts and IRBs. Whereas any random interested person could be the next Cambridge Analytica. So like so much regulation, it's unfortunate but made necessary by jerks.
scarejunba 7y ago
That's life, my man. If you think you're going to get the same access as Raj Chetty is, you're in for a rude surprise. The society of academia is built on trust and since people abhor providing information, academics who have other means of demonstrating trustworthiness will be the ones with access. This is true of everything from IRS data to a startup's data. I worked at a company which shared data extensively with researchers. But we weren't idiots. We gave it to people we trusted. Not every clown claiming to be an independent researcher. That's just sensible.
speedplane 7y ago
> The issue I see is that it limits the usage to those associated with Academic Institutions. What if you're a data scientist, or an interested person, not working in Academia? Any research you'd want to do and publish isn't good enough, unrelated to the research itself? Seems unfortunate. Today, data is gold. Companies may give it to academic institutions for free, but that's mostly because they hope the academics will publish their work and cite to the original source data, effectively free marketing.

GrumpyNl 7y ago

Had to look up how many engineers they have, around 4000. That's a lot.

cfv 7y ago

As long as they stop leaving apps dead on the water whenever they decide to maybe develop something remotely related, as has happened several times in the past, then I guess this is good? My previous exp with them isn't super encouraging unfortunately.

rhizome 7y ago
This could very well be a "they let Jack remain CEO" dangle, so I'm going to be waiting for another shoe to drop. People will jump on it right away and one of those people will be the first to get burned by whatever develops (and I'm pretty sure there will be burning in the future), and we'll hear about it then. That's the point at which I'll decide to participate or not.

MrGilbert 7y ago

I had a bot once, which would tweet a single word from the 300k most used words in German every 15 minutes (there is a corpus for that). The bot even had "Bot" in it's name. It got striked several times by Twitter because of "hate-speech". Yes, the words were unfiltered - of course. That's language. The longest strike lasted for 5 days. It goes without saying that I disputed every single strike to no avail. I finally took the bot down.

lucasmullens 7y ago
I mean, in German you can cram a pretty large amount of hateful information into a single word, since many words are a combination of words. I'd be curious to see what specifically was flagged.
- MrGilbert 7y ago
  Well, mostly related to 1933 - 1945 references, if I recall it correct. Basically the "N-Word"-category, but related to jewish people. I think one tweet also said "Judenvernichtung" ("extermination of the Jews"). So, yeah, in hindsight, I should have modified the corpus. But at that time, around 2017, I was pretty angry at how Twitter handled these strikes. P.S.: The account is still online and has 775 followers. Maybe I should revive it in a more "harmless" way. It was fun.
  - lopmotr 7y ago
    If your intent was to show the most commonly used German words, then modifying the corpus for political or rule-breaking reasons kind of takes away its value, doesn't it? Twitter just isn't a place that tolerates all cultures the way an impartial academic would.
    - MrGilbert 7y ago
      Yes, indeed, that was the intention. Also having a long-running kind of „art installation“. End was projected for 2024. I thought about rebuilding it as a website. It could also work if I‘d use the ”fediverse“. Mhm, gets me thinking...

baggachipz 7y ago

Years ago I wrote a bot to correct people's poor grammar (specifically "I could care less"), stayed within the API limits, and clearly labeled the account as a bot. Banned by Twitter within a week. Their policies have always been arbitrary and selective, and this kind of vague language ensures that will continue.

strbean 7y ago
That's a semantic error, not a grammar error!
- dllthomas 7y ago
  I stopped being annoyed by it when I decided it was short for "I could care less, I guess, but only if I tried realllly hard."
  - strbean 7y ago
    Oh hi there!
    - dllthomas 7y ago
      o/
moeffju 7y ago
That is pretty spammy and, frankly, obnoxious. Not only is language constantly evolving, chances are that people didn't actually ask to be corrected (using commonly used and understood language), much less by a bot?
- tyre 7y ago
  > chances are that people didn't actually ask to be corrected If you remove the tweets that are something the parent tweet didn't ask for comment on, there would be nothing left.

minimaxir 7y ago

As someone who has made GPT-2-based Twitter bots, I think the reasonable compromise to the arbitrary app approval process is to allow limited bot access (tweeting only, no replies) through the API without requiring app approval. That would cover the majority of genuine fun bot use cases.

jdivo 7y ago

Bots just need banned or API limited... Twitter needs to be re-humazized

kdamica 7y ago

I run a couple of 'good' bots: https://twitter.com/thehugfairy https://twitter.com/thehugfairy - Sends Twitter hugs. You sign up at hugfairy.com to tell it who to hug. This one get's a lot of use. The website has about 1,500 DAU. https://twitter.com/smithsonianbot https://twitter.com/smithsonianbot - A more recent one, which sends random photos from Smithsonian's Open Access collection. Overall I'm glad to see Twitter clarifying their rules. I've had API keys revoked without warning, my accounts deactivated, etc. Twitter dev support is always nice and I've gotten the bots running again, but it would be great to know in advance how I can avoid getting shut down.

JoeMayoBot 7y ago

I've been supporting their API for several years, with a 3rd party library. It's always been mixed feelings, remembering the early days when the ecosystem was exciting and growing, yet the intermediate years when it felt like developers and businesses that built on their platform were getting screwed. Overall, it would be great if they could figure out how to clean up the bad actors, yet build a thriving platform for innovation - a balance they seem tortured to achieve. While a lot of developers have come and gone, I'm still hoping for better.

homero 7y ago

Never trust Twitter API or waste time developing on it. Many burnt bridges.

justlexi93 7y ago

We need real human customer support and not some automated system based algorithms

spondyl 7y ago

> Twitter says since it introduced a new developer review process in July 2018, it has reviewed over a million developer applications and approved 75%. There is still no re-review process however. I have an original apps.twitter.com account and used the new development experience form with the first few weeks. I essentially requested API access for personal projects and was denied with no substantive explanation. There is a form to submit a platform request hidden away in the support area (literally, it's not even on the page that lists all of the contact forms) but having used it about five times over a number of years has led to no response. I would like to be a developer, contributing to the ecosystem I've been a member of for just over 10 years but Twitter seems to make this exceedingly hard with no recourse available :(

gcc_programmer 7y ago

I know I will be downvoted, but I don't care: why are people using Twitter? To me it's the most vile and disgusting platform: no signal, just noise. On top of that, the people that run it are effectively coming up with arbitrary progressive left-wing policies on restricting free speech: for proof, watch this: https://youtu.be/DZCBRHOg3PQ https://youtu.be/DZCBRHOg3PQ after seeing I realised Twitter/Facebook/Google/Apple are evil corporations taking away your freedom with you cheering to it. Why are you using Twitter's platform? For business? Do you want to make business from Twitter's users which are mind-numbed angry, twitching zombies? Are there no business opportunities elsewhere? Anyone who is doing any sort of business related to social media is wasting their time: it's a broken system that deserves to be boycotted. To anyone who would call me angry: I am saying this so you open your mind about the pointlessness of social media: I dont use it, and I seem to live a nice life, only time I get angry is when I think about social media, like in this post. Oh well, this is HN after all, born and bred in silicon valley where such blasphemy will not be tolerated. But lets see.

anonytrary 7y ago

I don't like the term "good bot" and I really don't like the term "'good' bot", as if bots are always evil. We should just think of them "useful bots", "useless bots", or "malicious bots".