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Ben's account is already un-suspended, but only because he has a major presence and large audience (I would be shocked if people at Twitter didn't see this minu

Ben's account is already un-suspended, but only because he has a major presence and large audience (I would be shocked if people at Twitter didn't see this minutes into it happening or if Ben didn't have some direct line to various high up employees there). For the rest of us peasants: good luck getting help.

rgrieselhuber 4y ago
Especially if you ask the wrong questions.
mschuster91 4y ago
Even blue checkmarks don't help against trolls, far right and griefers running mass-report attacks. The problem at its core is that Twitter refuses to hire appropriate levels of moderation staff for the scale it has, and that it does nothing against raid instigators. Reddit at least has subreddit mods take care of most of the bullshit and at least the large subreddit mods have direct connections to Reddit, and Reddit itself fights back against communities that "raid" other subs, but even there it's common experience on subreddits like TwoX that women get reported to the Reddit Suicide Alert. Twitter however? Good luck if you're not in Germany where you can file for emergency civil injunctions against Twitter in the case of wrongful bans (Twitter and FB both learned the hard way to not ignore these) or have friends in media that can amplify your shitstorm. Twitter moderation teams only act on reports, they unlike Reddit don't seem to have any staff dedicated to monitoring sentiments and trends to detect abusive behavior.
- astura 4y ago
  Who is the "Reddit Suicide Alert?"
  - haunter 4y ago
    You can report any post or comment on reddit, an one option is "self-harm or suicide" https://i.imgur.com/aGLtTeW.png https://i.imgur.com/aGLtTeW.png I think it meant in a way that you are afraid of the person. If you are the one reported then you also get an automatic system message from reddit: someone thought you might have problems etc. Basically the suicide alert. Anyways people use it all the time in every single sub for any unrelated thing, just because they hate you, downvoting is not enough, trolling etc. In sport subs it's very common to report opposing fans with this option for example
    - onionisafruit 4y ago
      I comment a lot on /r/cfb and /r/nfl and I wasn’t aware of this. I don’t really trash talk, but I’m surprised at least one of my thousands of comments hasn’t elicited a suicide alert.
  - jffry 4y ago
    Basically a "feature" of Reddit which can be used to anonymously harass somebody on Reddit by having it send them a DM about suicide prevention. https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/4/21164687/reddit-new-suicide-prevention-tools-crisis-text-line https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/4/21164687/reddit-new-suicid...
    - formerly_proven 4y ago
      Which, just to be clear, is meant to convey the opposite obviously. "Reddit cares" is 99.99 % used by people to send others (I've seen mostly women raise this) a "kill yourself" message. Just like people who put "heartwarming" awards on posts about abuse, harassment etc. On some subreddits every other post will be reported like this. Meanwhile, Reddit tends to do very little about reports of even direct violence threats ala "I will find you and I will kill your children" etc. which are frequently found to "not be in violation of the terms of service".
  - themoonisachees 4y ago
    You can report someone if you think they're suicidal and they get a pm from reddit that says "we care about you, here's a suicide prevention hotline etc". It's used for trolling for some reason.
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
      Someone tried this on me, so I reported it, and a couple days later got a "yep, that was harassment, we're acting on it". Pleasant suprise.
- somehnacct3757 4y ago
  There's no such thing as appropriate moderation at Twitter scale. It's societal techology we as humans do not have. Underlying moderation is some shared vision of decency - morality claims that should be enforced via justice. These claims certainly don't exist across nation borders, and they barely exist within a given nation's borders. The bot moderation conundrum is a wholly second moderation question layered on top of the first. How do Twitter accounts map onto human bodies? Is it 1:1, like government ids? 1:many so brands can have accounts? many:1 so humans can amplify their voice? Until this is answered all moderation actions taken in the name of 'bot policy' is capricious. As is the assignment of blue checkmarks. Reddit struggles with these same problems at website-scale, where moderation must work across subreddits. They only appear to have a better solution because some topics at subreddit-scale make enough of the questions I raise irrelevant that you can install a goon and have them moderate via edict. Just like chat rooms and message boards did in the old days. To make that point a little clearer: you can be off-topic in a subreddit or an Orange Site thread, but you can't be off-topic anywhere on Twitter.
  - efitz 4y ago
    I think the solution is opt-in curation. If someone (or 10k someones) watches and compiles quality items of interest, maybe i want one of those feeds INSTEAD of Twitter’s ML algorithm. Twitter can still monetize but now curations could monetize individually via including specific ad tweets. And i want to subscribe to multiple curations, not just one. Twitter could even have their own ML algorithm as a curation but I want it to be explicit opt in. You could browse curations by popularity or topic and opt in to the ones you like, or opt out if you don’t like one anymore. Trolls wouldn’t get included in curations that anyone cared about. The down side is that it magnifies the social media echo chamber effect, but it also makes everyone’s feed more personally relevant.
    - bsnnkv 4y ago
      This sounds a lot like what I'm working on with Notado Feeds[1]. Users can curate feeds (with RSS subscriptions) on specific topics from their libraries that get automatically populated. I haven't published a dedicated article on this feature yet, but it's coming. For an idea of what it looks like in practice, these are my feeds on software development[2] and capitalism[3]. Interested in one but not the other? No problem, ignore the capitalism feed and just sub to the software development feed; you don't have to be hit by a train of all of my thoughts on every little topic by subscribing to an all-encompassing feed. I'm currently working on a piece around feed discoverability that will integrate RSS subscription stats in few interesting late 90s/early 00s-web ways. [1]: https://notado.app https://notado.app [2]: https://notado.app/feeds/jado/software-development https://notado.app/feeds/jado/software-development [3]: https://notado.app/feeds/jado/capitalism https://notado.app/feeds/jado/capitalism
- lapcat 4y ago
  > The problem at its core is that Twitter refuses to hire appropriate levels of moderation staff for the scale it has I don't believe that anyone could moderate at Twitter's scale. More than 500 million tweets are published per day. How do you moderate that? It's like bringing an umbrella to a tsunami. Not to mention, Reddit moderation is crap. I've tried to use Reddit several times but gave up each time, because my innocent comments — mainly writing technical help — were getting moderated. I wasn't writing anything political; I couldn't even post on r/apple! They still use a lot of automation on Reddit in the bigger subreddits.
  - rfrey 4y ago
    The important thing is that humans review algorithmic bans, not review every tweet.
    - lapcat 4y ago
      That's still a huge number. Twitter doesn't make enough revenue to hire enough people to do that intelligently.
      - mschuster91 4y ago
        Then they have to raise money? You can't operate a chemical factory without paying for adequate measures to prevent spewing toxic waste into common resources like air and water, so why should you be allowed to run a facility that spews toxic hate into societies without establishing adequate protection?! If there is one thing that made the internet so toxic, it was services labeled as "free" that in reality were nothing more than avenues for advertisers to shove ads down our throats, with the cost being our societies breaking apart as a result of all the lone village nutcases suddenly unifying themselves and no one paying for the virtual equivalent of the police to make sure the nutcases don't create chaos.
        lapcat 4y ago
        > Then they have to raise money? I think they're trying. ;-) To be clear, I'm not defending Twitter. If I was in charge, I would actually shut down Twitter for the benefit of the world. My point is just the basic financial fact that Twitter doesn't have enough money to do this, and thus they won't, indeed can't.
- coffeeblack 4y ago
  > Twitter and FB both learned the hard way to not ignore these Are there actual cases (plural)? I only know one lawyer and one case where that happened and was decided by the BGH (federal court).
- the_doctah 4y ago
  Blue checkmarks have been a joke for years. And imagine using Reddit as an example of "good" moderation.
alfiedotwtf 4y ago
Yep. My account got suspended a few years ago. But to be honest, it was a blessing in disguise. Twitter for me was a huge time sink, even though I followed really interesting people talking about things I was really interesting. But once I got a forced detox, I realised I just gained back hours a week to do other things. Get off Twitter. Even better, turn off that TV.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
  That is basically how I feel about my LinkedIn. Now I am actually working on a personal replacement of that online presence piece. Frankly, it was high time.
- breck 4y ago
  I find Twitter amazing. (though I'm currently suspended again - https://twitter.com/breckyunits https://twitter.com/breckyunits). The trick is not to have a smart phone. When I'm coding I can pop in and out of Twitter. But then when I close the lid I'm unplugged.
  - psychphysic 4y ago
    But why do you keep getting suspended?
    - htrp 4y ago
      No smart phone... and no twitter app install.
      - mikro2nd 4y ago
        Not so. I, too, have no smartphone and no Twitter app. Not ever been suspended (yet).
    - commandlinefan 4y ago
      Stratechery interviews?
    - 4y ago
matthewdgreen 4y ago
You're benefiting from a massive open, unpartitioned platform (meaning, anyone can join and form communities/reply-to tweets, without isolating things to friend-groups or creating 'subreddits' with human moderators gatekeeping them). The platform gives you unprecedented global reach, and most amazingly: it's still functional and hasn't been drowned in spam. I think people need to take a breath and realize that this is an incredible technical accomplishment in 2022 (or 2015, 2009, 2001) given the ambient noise level of the Internet. You are not going to keep a platform like this readable and still be able to apply loving, artisanal human decision-making to it: there aren't enough human beings in the world. If you start a new account that behaves like spam, there's a good chance that you'll get treated like spam -- and that's probably an acceptable tradeoff because the alternative is no working platform at all.
rchaud 4y ago
Sounds like how complaints about Stripe magically get personal attention from company insiders, but only after being publicized to HN.
- mritchie712 4y ago
  to be fair, stripe has thousands of businesses and real money on the line. they are going to get some things wrong. My experience (in one of their target markets of b2b SaaS) has been flawless.
  - rchaud 4y ago
    But Stripe should provide timelier service than Twitter precisely because there is real money on the line. If Twitter suspends my account, I wouldn't expect much considering it's a free service with tens of millions more users than Stripe. They're definitely going to get more things wrong.
    - adrr 4y ago
      You can always get your own merchant account. Stripe is about being convenient since they don't due all the diligence of a bank when you sign up for a merchant account.
shadowgovt 4y ago
What are the practical alternatives? I'd imagine this is an issue one would see less often on a Mastodon node, as nodes tend to have fewer users per node so moderators / admins can respond more promptly to system failures, and if one doesn't like how an admin is running affairs, one can switch nodes.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- JacobThreeThree 4y ago
  A federated system like Mastadon seems to be a good technical solution, but I think the more simple solution is to spend your valuable time on platforms that have better moderation, or invest in building your own website/platform.
  - BitwiseFool 4y ago
    The proposed solution is simple, but the problem has always been audience and discovery. Even if you managed to find a perfect platform with a decent userbase, you would still need to rely on people sharing links to your content on the more widely known platforms. Very rarely do people stumble upon blogs and niche social media sites.
- IshKebab 4y ago
  Offer reasonable options to get it reinstated of course.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    I'm not sure what reasonable looks like when a system has 237 million daily active users and the reinstatement system itself would be intentionally gamed by adversaries. Do we have any examples to draw from operating at that scale? Due to the Musk purchase, we have a rare public disclosure of a major tech giant's internal workings where Twitter claims (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jul/07/twitter-says-it-suspends-1m-spam-users-a-day-as-elon-musk-dispute-deepens https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jul/07/twitter-s...) it suspends half a million spam accounts a day. It's trivial to file an appeal, so (because the attackers are by no means disincentivized from appealing) that's probably on the order of 250,000 appeals a day if we assume even half the banned won't bother (and I think that assumption is low, since a reasonable system should probably make it trivial to file an appeal, therefore people will). How does one reasonably handle that? To scale up to thousands of humans handling it, you'd need strict rules to even approximate getting the same result across everyone, and if strict rules worked you could code them into the auto-ban system. One solution might actually be "Stop having 'get every human being on the service' as a goal," but then sucks for the people who can't use the thing.
danso 4y ago
I've played devil's advocate elsewhere in the thread, but this is such a petty and irrelevant kerfuffle, as far as Big-Tech-Censorship goes. By Ben's own description of how the @StratecheryINT account was operated [0] -- i.e. "a new account that has posted a bunch of links (all Stratechery interviews) in a short amount of time, from multiple locations around the world." -- this is exactly the kind of low-hanging fruit that we'd want Twitter spam-detectors to cull with minimal time and resources. Not only b/c of the obvious spam characteristics, but because it was a days-old account with few (if any) followers/followings. Even if it were a mistake, very little of value has been lost, since every tweet was the result of an automated script (i.e. simple to make a new account, and recreate the content that had thus far zero engagement). Do people seriously think every such case -- an empty days-old account suddenly doing spam-like activity -- should be manually reviewed? That's a daily waste of human resources for tens of thousands (edit: actually it's millions [1]) of trivial permaban decisions -- exactly the kind of thing that an autoban algorithm can efficiently handle. > For the rest of us peasants: good luck getting help. I have the same sentiment, but with a different angle. Verified accounts like Thompson's get a lot of leeway with bending/breaking the rules before facing actual punishment. If a lesser known user deployed a selenium-twitter-spam-bot on AWS, it's possible both their spam bot and their real account would be permanently suspended [0] https://twitter.com/benthompson/status/1583062865116041229 https://twitter.com/benthompson/status/1583062865116041229 [1] https://twitter.com/paraga/status/1526237583058952192?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1526237583058952192%7Ctwgr%5E9d286983482d1827f9533c9db48584f961510930%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Ftechnology%2F2022%2Fjul%2F07%2Ftwitter-says-it-suspends-1m-spam-users-a-day-as-elon-musk-dispute-deepens https://twitter.com/paraga/status/1526237583058952192?ref_sr...
- lapcat 4y ago
  > Verified accounts like Thompson's get a lot of leeway with bending/breaking the rules before facing actual punishment. Which rules did he break?
- rjzzleep 4y ago
  It doesn't have to be a lot of links, if you piss off the wrong people and they massreport you you're temporarily out. You can reach out to support, but I don't know that support actually ever responds to any requests. Apparently according to posts on reddit if you add your number to twitter and something happens you won't even be able to ever remove it. Similarly they have weird intransparent policies regarding what numbers are allowed on twitter. At the end of the day, most tech giants are unreachable. I hate to be that guy,but in a way it's kind of like the big chinese tech dystopia that all HN so adamantly complain about.
shitlord 4y ago
My Twitter account was suspended for "spam" a year ago because I kept replying to someone with the same reaction image. They reverted the suspension pretty quickly after I appealed. I guess they handle appeals differently depending on the alleged infraction.
celeritascelery 4y ago
This is another power imbalance that is so frustrating. The account was “permanently suspended”, which you think means permanently suspended. But that only applies to normies. All the words are meaningless if twitter says otherwise. It’s really like living under a medieval king who is a law unto himself.
- brazzy 4y ago
  Wrong tree to bark up. "Permanently" only means there is no time limit with an automatic reactivation afterwards. It's absolutely possible for a "normie" to get a permanent ban reviewed and lifted.
  - CharlesW 4y ago
    The point is that they're using "permanently suspended" to mean "indefinitely suspended". They could also just say "suspended".
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      "Indefinitely" is reasonable, but doesn't make it clear that they have finished their current investigation. So it's also imperfect. Just "suspended" is not a good option at all, because it says nothing about duration.
    - cgriswald 4y ago
      "Indefinitely suspended" implies that Twitter might, on its own, lift the suspension at some point in the future. "Permanently suspended" (with chance to appeal the suspension in the message) means exactly what happened here.
    - creata 4y ago
      "Indefinitely suspended" might be better, but just "suspended" is probably going to be very confusing. In education, for example, "suspension" is a temporary ban, and "expulsion" is a permanent ban.
- 4y ago
rogerallen 4y ago
My twitter evolutionary art bot @tweegeemee is going through a fiasco like this, but I don't have nearly the same presence as Ben. The account was suspended for 10 days and I'm still trying to get the app (separately suspended) that runs it unsuspended... They must be going through some kind of crazy time over there between nation-state trolls, the Musk fiasco and the run-up to midterm elections. Yeesh.
maddynator 4y ago
Yeah completely matches my experience. Twitter banned my account for far less and unlike Ben, I dont have major presence or large audience. I wrote about my experience on the blog [0] so others can learn but what I learned is that there is an automated system to flag and automated system to respond to your questions and the later system rejects 99.99% of cases. You have to be in Ben's position to fall into that .01% [0] https://thinkingthrough.substack.com/p/twitter-ban https://thinkingthrough.substack.com/p/twitter-ban
hintymad 4y ago
I was wondering why Twitter does not tell account owners what exactly violates their Twitter Rules. Isn't this exactly the same as the very censorship of those totalitarian countries: they tell you break some rules but they never tell you which rules, so you're forced to self censor, and they can interpret their rules however they like. It is this kind of behavior that make me lose my trust with Twitter (or YouTube or FB, and etc).

rgrieselhuber 4y ago

Especially if you ask the wrong questions.

mschuster91 4y ago

Even blue checkmarks don't help against trolls, far right and griefers running mass-report attacks. The problem at its core is that Twitter refuses to hire appropriate levels of moderation staff for the scale it has, and that it does nothing against raid instigators. Reddit at least has subreddit mods take care of most of the bullshit and at least the large subreddit mods have direct connections to Reddit, and Reddit itself fights back against communities that "raid" other subs, but even there it's common experience on subreddits like TwoX that women get reported to the Reddit Suicide Alert. Twitter however? Good luck if you're not in Germany where you can file for emergency civil injunctions against Twitter in the case of wrongful bans (Twitter and FB both learned the hard way to not ignore these) or have friends in media that can amplify your shitstorm. Twitter moderation teams only act on reports, they unlike Reddit don't seem to have any staff dedicated to monitoring sentiments and trends to detect abusive behavior.

astura 4y ago
Who is the "Reddit Suicide Alert?"
- haunter 4y ago
  You can report any post or comment on reddit, an one option is "self-harm or suicide" https://i.imgur.com/aGLtTeW.png https://i.imgur.com/aGLtTeW.png I think it meant in a way that you are afraid of the person. If you are the one reported then you also get an automatic system message from reddit: someone thought you might have problems etc. Basically the suicide alert. Anyways people use it all the time in every single sub for any unrelated thing, just because they hate you, downvoting is not enough, trolling etc. In sport subs it's very common to report opposing fans with this option for example
  - onionisafruit 4y ago
    I comment a lot on /r/cfb and /r/nfl and I wasn’t aware of this. I don’t really trash talk, but I’m surprised at least one of my thousands of comments hasn’t elicited a suicide alert.
- jffry 4y ago
  Basically a "feature" of Reddit which can be used to anonymously harass somebody on Reddit by having it send them a DM about suicide prevention. https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/4/21164687/reddit-new-suicide-prevention-tools-crisis-text-line https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/4/21164687/reddit-new-suicid...
  - formerly_proven 4y ago
    Which, just to be clear, is meant to convey the opposite obviously. "Reddit cares" is 99.99 % used by people to send others (I've seen mostly women raise this) a "kill yourself" message. Just like people who put "heartwarming" awards on posts about abuse, harassment etc. On some subreddits every other post will be reported like this. Meanwhile, Reddit tends to do very little about reports of even direct violence threats ala "I will find you and I will kill your children" etc. which are frequently found to "not be in violation of the terms of service".
- themoonisachees 4y ago
  You can report someone if you think they're suicidal and they get a pm from reddit that says "we care about you, here's a suicide prevention hotline etc". It's used for trolling for some reason.
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    Someone tried this on me, so I reported it, and a couple days later got a "yep, that was harassment, we're acting on it". Pleasant suprise.
somehnacct3757 4y ago
There's no such thing as appropriate moderation at Twitter scale. It's societal techology we as humans do not have. Underlying moderation is some shared vision of decency - morality claims that should be enforced via justice. These claims certainly don't exist across nation borders, and they barely exist within a given nation's borders. The bot moderation conundrum is a wholly second moderation question layered on top of the first. How do Twitter accounts map onto human bodies? Is it 1:1, like government ids? 1:many so brands can have accounts? many:1 so humans can amplify their voice? Until this is answered all moderation actions taken in the name of 'bot policy' is capricious. As is the assignment of blue checkmarks. Reddit struggles with these same problems at website-scale, where moderation must work across subreddits. They only appear to have a better solution because some topics at subreddit-scale make enough of the questions I raise irrelevant that you can install a goon and have them moderate via edict. Just like chat rooms and message boards did in the old days. To make that point a little clearer: you can be off-topic in a subreddit or an Orange Site thread, but you can't be off-topic anywhere on Twitter.
- efitz 4y ago
  I think the solution is opt-in curation. If someone (or 10k someones) watches and compiles quality items of interest, maybe i want one of those feeds INSTEAD of Twitter’s ML algorithm. Twitter can still monetize but now curations could monetize individually via including specific ad tweets. And i want to subscribe to multiple curations, not just one. Twitter could even have their own ML algorithm as a curation but I want it to be explicit opt in. You could browse curations by popularity or topic and opt in to the ones you like, or opt out if you don’t like one anymore. Trolls wouldn’t get included in curations that anyone cared about. The down side is that it magnifies the social media echo chamber effect, but it also makes everyone’s feed more personally relevant.
  - bsnnkv 4y ago
    This sounds a lot like what I'm working on with Notado Feeds[1]. Users can curate feeds (with RSS subscriptions) on specific topics from their libraries that get automatically populated. I haven't published a dedicated article on this feature yet, but it's coming. For an idea of what it looks like in practice, these are my feeds on software development[2] and capitalism[3]. Interested in one but not the other? No problem, ignore the capitalism feed and just sub to the software development feed; you don't have to be hit by a train of all of my thoughts on every little topic by subscribing to an all-encompassing feed. I'm currently working on a piece around feed discoverability that will integrate RSS subscription stats in few interesting late 90s/early 00s-web ways. [1]: https://notado.app https://notado.app [2]: https://notado.app/feeds/jado/software-development https://notado.app/feeds/jado/software-development [3]: https://notado.app/feeds/jado/capitalism https://notado.app/feeds/jado/capitalism
lapcat 4y ago
> The problem at its core is that Twitter refuses to hire appropriate levels of moderation staff for the scale it has I don't believe that anyone could moderate at Twitter's scale. More than 500 million tweets are published per day. How do you moderate that? It's like bringing an umbrella to a tsunami. Not to mention, Reddit moderation is crap. I've tried to use Reddit several times but gave up each time, because my innocent comments — mainly writing technical help — were getting moderated. I wasn't writing anything political; I couldn't even post on r/apple! They still use a lot of automation on Reddit in the bigger subreddits.
- rfrey 4y ago
  The important thing is that humans review algorithmic bans, not review every tweet.
  - lapcat 4y ago
    That's still a huge number. Twitter doesn't make enough revenue to hire enough people to do that intelligently.
    - mschuster91 4y ago
      Then they have to raise money? You can't operate a chemical factory without paying for adequate measures to prevent spewing toxic waste into common resources like air and water, so why should you be allowed to run a facility that spews toxic hate into societies without establishing adequate protection?! If there is one thing that made the internet so toxic, it was services labeled as "free" that in reality were nothing more than avenues for advertisers to shove ads down our throats, with the cost being our societies breaking apart as a result of all the lone village nutcases suddenly unifying themselves and no one paying for the virtual equivalent of the police to make sure the nutcases don't create chaos.
      - lapcat 4y ago
        > Then they have to raise money? I think they're trying. ;-) To be clear, I'm not defending Twitter. If I was in charge, I would actually shut down Twitter for the benefit of the world. My point is just the basic financial fact that Twitter doesn't have enough money to do this, and thus they won't, indeed can't.
coffeeblack 4y ago
> Twitter and FB both learned the hard way to not ignore these Are there actual cases (plural)? I only know one lawyer and one case where that happened and was decided by the BGH (federal court).
the_doctah 4y ago
Blue checkmarks have been a joke for years. And imagine using Reddit as an example of "good" moderation.

alfiedotwtf 4y ago

Yep. My account got suspended a few years ago. But to be honest, it was a blessing in disguise. Twitter for me was a huge time sink, even though I followed really interesting people talking about things I was really interesting. But once I got a forced detox, I realised I just gained back hours a week to do other things. Get off Twitter. Even better, turn off that TV.

A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
That is basically how I feel about my LinkedIn. Now I am actually working on a personal replacement of that online presence piece. Frankly, it was high time.
breck 4y ago
I find Twitter amazing. (though I'm currently suspended again - https://twitter.com/breckyunits https://twitter.com/breckyunits). The trick is not to have a smart phone. When I'm coding I can pop in and out of Twitter. But then when I close the lid I'm unplugged.
- psychphysic 4y ago
  But why do you keep getting suspended?
  - htrp 4y ago
    No smart phone... and no twitter app install.
    - mikro2nd 4y ago
      Not so. I, too, have no smartphone and no Twitter app. Not ever been suspended (yet).
  - commandlinefan 4y ago
    Stratechery interviews?
  - 4y ago

matthewdgreen 4y ago

You're benefiting from a massive open, unpartitioned platform (meaning, anyone can join and form communities/reply-to tweets, without isolating things to friend-groups or creating 'subreddits' with human moderators gatekeeping them). The platform gives you unprecedented global reach, and most amazingly: it's still functional and hasn't been drowned in spam. I think people need to take a breath and realize that this is an incredible technical accomplishment in 2022 (or 2015, 2009, 2001) given the ambient noise level of the Internet. You are not going to keep a platform like this readable and still be able to apply loving, artisanal human decision-making to it: there aren't enough human beings in the world. If you start a new account that behaves like spam, there's a good chance that you'll get treated like spam -- and that's probably an acceptable tradeoff because the alternative is no working platform at all.

rchaud 4y ago

Sounds like how complaints about Stripe magically get personal attention from company insiders, but only after being publicized to HN.

mritchie712 4y ago
to be fair, stripe has thousands of businesses and real money on the line. they are going to get some things wrong. My experience (in one of their target markets of b2b SaaS) has been flawless.
- rchaud 4y ago
  But Stripe should provide timelier service than Twitter precisely because there is real money on the line. If Twitter suspends my account, I wouldn't expect much considering it's a free service with tens of millions more users than Stripe. They're definitely going to get more things wrong.
  - adrr 4y ago
    You can always get your own merchant account. Stripe is about being convenient since they don't due all the diligence of a bank when you sign up for a merchant account.

shadowgovt 4y ago

What are the practical alternatives? I'd imagine this is an issue one would see less often on a Mastodon node, as nodes tend to have fewer users per node so moderators / admins can respond more promptly to system failures, and if one doesn't like how an admin is running affairs, one can switch nodes.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
JacobThreeThree 4y ago
A federated system like Mastadon seems to be a good technical solution, but I think the more simple solution is to spend your valuable time on platforms that have better moderation, or invest in building your own website/platform.
- BitwiseFool 4y ago
  The proposed solution is simple, but the problem has always been audience and discovery. Even if you managed to find a perfect platform with a decent userbase, you would still need to rely on people sharing links to your content on the more widely known platforms. Very rarely do people stumble upon blogs and niche social media sites.
IshKebab 4y ago
Offer reasonable options to get it reinstated of course.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  I'm not sure what reasonable looks like when a system has 237 million daily active users and the reinstatement system itself would be intentionally gamed by adversaries. Do we have any examples to draw from operating at that scale? Due to the Musk purchase, we have a rare public disclosure of a major tech giant's internal workings where Twitter claims (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jul/07/twitter-says-it-suspends-1m-spam-users-a-day-as-elon-musk-dispute-deepens https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jul/07/twitter-s...) it suspends half a million spam accounts a day. It's trivial to file an appeal, so (because the attackers are by no means disincentivized from appealing) that's probably on the order of 250,000 appeals a day if we assume even half the banned won't bother (and I think that assumption is low, since a reasonable system should probably make it trivial to file an appeal, therefore people will). How does one reasonably handle that? To scale up to thousands of humans handling it, you'd need strict rules to even approximate getting the same result across everyone, and if strict rules worked you could code them into the auto-ban system. One solution might actually be "Stop having 'get every human being on the service' as a goal," but then sucks for the people who can't use the thing.

danso 4y ago

I've played devil's advocate elsewhere in the thread, but this is such a petty and irrelevant kerfuffle, as far as Big-Tech-Censorship goes. By Ben's own description of how the @StratecheryINT account was operated [0] -- i.e. "a new account that has posted a bunch of links (all Stratechery interviews) in a short amount of time, from multiple locations around the world." -- this is exactly the kind of low-hanging fruit that we'd want Twitter spam-detectors to cull with minimal time and resources. Not only b/c of the obvious spam characteristics, but because it was a days-old account with few (if any) followers/followings. Even if it were a mistake, very little of value has been lost, since every tweet was the result of an automated script (i.e. simple to make a new account, and recreate the content that had thus far zero engagement). Do people seriously think every such case -- an empty days-old account suddenly doing spam-like activity -- should be manually reviewed? That's a daily waste of human resources for tens of thousands (edit: actually it's millions [1]) of trivial permaban decisions -- exactly the kind of thing that an autoban algorithm can efficiently handle. > For the rest of us peasants: good luck getting help. I have the same sentiment, but with a different angle. Verified accounts like Thompson's get a lot of leeway with bending/breaking the rules before facing actual punishment. If a lesser known user deployed a selenium-twitter-spam-bot on AWS, it's possible both their spam bot and their real account would be permanently suspended [0] https://twitter.com/benthompson/status/1583062865116041229 https://twitter.com/benthompson/status/1583062865116041229 [1] https://twitter.com/paraga/status/1526237583058952192?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1526237583058952192%7Ctwgr%5E9d286983482d1827f9533c9db48584f961510930%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Ftechnology%2F2022%2Fjul%2F07%2Ftwitter-says-it-suspends-1m-spam-users-a-day-as-elon-musk-dispute-deepens https://twitter.com/paraga/status/1526237583058952192?ref_sr...

lapcat 4y ago
> Verified accounts like Thompson's get a lot of leeway with bending/breaking the rules before facing actual punishment. Which rules did he break?
rjzzleep 4y ago
It doesn't have to be a lot of links, if you piss off the wrong people and they massreport you you're temporarily out. You can reach out to support, but I don't know that support actually ever responds to any requests. Apparently according to posts on reddit if you add your number to twitter and something happens you won't even be able to ever remove it. Similarly they have weird intransparent policies regarding what numbers are allowed on twitter. At the end of the day, most tech giants are unreachable. I hate to be that guy,but in a way it's kind of like the big chinese tech dystopia that all HN so adamantly complain about.

shitlord 4y ago

My Twitter account was suspended for "spam" a year ago because I kept replying to someone with the same reaction image. They reverted the suspension pretty quickly after I appealed. I guess they handle appeals differently depending on the alleged infraction.

celeritascelery 4y ago

This is another power imbalance that is so frustrating. The account was “permanently suspended”, which you think means permanently suspended. But that only applies to normies. All the words are meaningless if twitter says otherwise. It’s really like living under a medieval king who is a law unto himself.

brazzy 4y ago
Wrong tree to bark up. "Permanently" only means there is no time limit with an automatic reactivation afterwards. It's absolutely possible for a "normie" to get a permanent ban reviewed and lifted.
- CharlesW 4y ago
  The point is that they're using "permanently suspended" to mean "indefinitely suspended". They could also just say "suspended".
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    "Indefinitely" is reasonable, but doesn't make it clear that they have finished their current investigation. So it's also imperfect. Just "suspended" is not a good option at all, because it says nothing about duration.
  - cgriswald 4y ago
    "Indefinitely suspended" implies that Twitter might, on its own, lift the suspension at some point in the future. "Permanently suspended" (with chance to appeal the suspension in the message) means exactly what happened here.
  - creata 4y ago
    "Indefinitely suspended" might be better, but just "suspended" is probably going to be very confusing. In education, for example, "suspension" is a temporary ban, and "expulsion" is a permanent ban.
4y ago

rogerallen 4y ago

My twitter evolutionary art bot @tweegeemee is going through a fiasco like this, but I don't have nearly the same presence as Ben. The account was suspended for 10 days and I'm still trying to get the app (separately suspended) that runs it unsuspended... They must be going through some kind of crazy time over there between nation-state trolls, the Musk fiasco and the run-up to midterm elections. Yeesh.

maddynator 4y ago

Yeah completely matches my experience. Twitter banned my account for far less and unlike Ben, I dont have major presence or large audience. I wrote about my experience on the blog [0] so others can learn but what I learned is that there is an automated system to flag and automated system to respond to your questions and the later system rejects 99.99% of cases. You have to be in Ben's position to fall into that .01% [0] https://thinkingthrough.substack.com/p/twitter-ban https://thinkingthrough.substack.com/p/twitter-ban

hintymad 4y ago

I was wondering why Twitter does not tell account owners what exactly violates their Twitter Rules. Isn't this exactly the same as the very censorship of those totalitarian countries: they tell you break some rules but they never tell you which rules, so you're forced to self censor, and they can interpret their rules however they like. It is this kind of behavior that make me lose my trust with Twitter (or YouTube or FB, and etc).