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That's an unusual example. Most posts on twitter are not formulaic recognition of holidays by politicians. In general, not knowing if a machine or a human wrot

That's an unusual example. Most posts on twitter are not formulaic recognition of holidays by politicians. In general, not knowing if a machine or a human wrote a twitter post is a bad thing.

makeitdouble 4y ago
There’s many variations of this. News outlets and fans tweeting sports results. Public event celebration (new year, xmas, father day etc.). The vast majority of these tweets could be managed by bots and we wouldn’t know the difference. I actually follow many bots on twitter knowingly, but they could be people in disguise I wouldn’t care. In my opinion, the content of a tweet (is it spam ? is it abusing the platform ?) matters way more than wether it’s a bot or a human doing the spamming/abuse.
- throw_nbvc1234 4y ago
  > In my opinion, the content of a tweet (is it spam ? is it abusing the platform ?) matters way more than wether it’s a bot or a human doing the spamming/abuse. What about replies and retweets? EX: If you have high quality (or good faith) content that's supported/attacked by bots vs real people.
  - H8crilA 4y ago
    I'm posting this only to further decrease the upvote/comment ratio.
  - makeitdouble 4y ago
    I kinda wish engagement had less effect on content visibility and having a swarm of bots "attacking" a comment wasn't decisive. Talking about HN comments, some have extremely bad but feel good takes that will garner a huge first wave of upvotes, to then get beaten down as it got more attention, to perhaps get some more sympathy votes as timezones shift. The interesting part to me is the comment can go all the cycles because it stays there, is still visible even when flagged to death and can be rescued. That's also how I read reddit, with downvoted to death comments and posts in the timeline. People who care enough should probably do the same for Twitter as well. Disclaimer: I am not politicaly engaged so have less exposure to the nastier battles where thousands of people shout a each other. I still don't understand why anyone would go there in their free time. PS: I also don't think there is any one size fits all strategy for a service used by millions of people all over the globe. To me the "divide and conquer" approach reddit takes is a better fit, and expecting Twitter, or any social media to have a good mechanism to deal with social swarms is a pipe dream...dealing with abuse when you can have 5000 ton gorillas throwing their weight in the balance would be a tall order for any private company.
    - sroussey 4y ago
      I think TikTok nailed this. They will promote posts to their home page that do not have lots of engagement but but are high quality for the site.
nradov 4y ago
Why do you want to know if a machine or human wrote a tweet? What difference does it make, and where do you draw the line? If I use Grammarly to correct my language in a tweet then did a machine write it? How about if I generate text using GPT-3 and then manually edit it? Please define your terms.
- epgui 4y ago
  One is more labour intensive and more expensive. The other can be done at scale for cheap. The negative impacts most likely don’t scale linearly, so volume is an outsized concern.
weisk 4y ago
[not knowing if a machine or a human wrote a twitter post is a bad thing] And what difference does it make, wether some content was written by an algorithm or it was written by professional staff, when the objective might be the same: to misguide / influence you to act in someone else's favour
- TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
  A brief conversation is usually all it takes me to notice even the more elaborate bots. I would share my methods, but I'd prefer they not figure it out too quickly. Suffice it to say bots just don't behave the way a human would.

That's an unusual example. Most posts on twitter are not formulaic recognition of holidays by politicians. In general, not knowing if a machine or a human wrote a twitter post is a bad thing.

makeitdouble 4y ago

There’s many variations of this. News outlets and fans tweeting sports results. Public event celebration (new year, xmas, father day etc.). The vast majority of these tweets could be managed by bots and we wouldn’t know the difference. I actually follow many bots on twitter knowingly, but they could be people in disguise I wouldn’t care. In my opinion, the content of a tweet (is it spam ? is it abusing the platform ?) matters way more than wether it’s a bot or a human doing the spamming/abuse.

throw_nbvc1234 4y ago
> In my opinion, the content of a tweet (is it spam ? is it abusing the platform ?) matters way more than wether it’s a bot or a human doing the spamming/abuse. What about replies and retweets? EX: If you have high quality (or good faith) content that's supported/attacked by bots vs real people.
- H8crilA 4y ago
  I'm posting this only to further decrease the upvote/comment ratio.
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  I kinda wish engagement had less effect on content visibility and having a swarm of bots "attacking" a comment wasn't decisive. Talking about HN comments, some have extremely bad but feel good takes that will garner a huge first wave of upvotes, to then get beaten down as it got more attention, to perhaps get some more sympathy votes as timezones shift. The interesting part to me is the comment can go all the cycles because it stays there, is still visible even when flagged to death and can be rescued. That's also how I read reddit, with downvoted to death comments and posts in the timeline. People who care enough should probably do the same for Twitter as well. Disclaimer: I am not politicaly engaged so have less exposure to the nastier battles where thousands of people shout a each other. I still don't understand why anyone would go there in their free time. PS: I also don't think there is any one size fits all strategy for a service used by millions of people all over the globe. To me the "divide and conquer" approach reddit takes is a better fit, and expecting Twitter, or any social media to have a good mechanism to deal with social swarms is a pipe dream...dealing with abuse when you can have 5000 ton gorillas throwing their weight in the balance would be a tall order for any private company.
  - sroussey 4y ago
    I think TikTok nailed this. They will promote posts to their home page that do not have lots of engagement but but are high quality for the site.

nradov 4y ago

Why do you want to know if a machine or human wrote a tweet? What difference does it make, and where do you draw the line? If I use Grammarly to correct my language in a tweet then did a machine write it? How about if I generate text using GPT-3 and then manually edit it? Please define your terms.

epgui 4y ago
One is more labour intensive and more expensive. The other can be done at scale for cheap. The negative impacts most likely don’t scale linearly, so volume is an outsized concern.

weisk 4y ago

[not knowing if a machine or a human wrote a twitter post is a bad thing] And what difference does it make, wether some content was written by an algorithm or it was written by professional staff, when the objective might be the same: to misguide / influence you to act in someone else's favour

TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
A brief conversation is usually all it takes me to notice even the more elaborate bots. I would share my methods, but I'd prefer they not figure it out too quickly. Suffice it to say bots just don't behave the way a human would.