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Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting Them Down Themselves

theintercept.com

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Re: Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting Them Down Themselves

#11

Post by hinkley »

johnc1231 wrote: post #10
obblekk wrote: post #6

This is an interesting approach. Maybe Twitter shouldn't solve the fake accounts problem directly, maybe they should come up with an evaluation criteria and then create a market for identifying fake accounts. If their evaluation criteria is good, they could get away with 0 cost to build the best possible system (motivated by competition on a market).

I think Twitter's biggest problem with fake accounts is not that they are hard to identify, but that if they do identify them and shut them down, it'll hurt their "number of active users" stats

Their Perverse Incentive is probably to shut down fake accounts faster than they are created. Such that they are 90% effective in, say, 5 years so that the active users takes a haircut instead of a big drop.

Re: Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting Them Down Themselves

#12

Post by smsm42 »

reificator wrote: post #5
dang wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's that some article titles use all-caps typography and then HN users copy it. We're going to write a bit of software to convert these, or at least ask submitters to revise them. In the meantime we've edited the title above.

It's frustrating that the site markup is (almost) correct[1], because IMO the browser is in the wrong here. I think it makes more sense for the browser to copy the text as it is in the markup, because all-caps is a stylistic choice not a content choice. I can see the argument the other way around, where the text the user selects should be the text they copy, and that makes sense. But I maintain that the same article…

> I can see the argument the other way around, where the text the user selects should be the text they copy

This is almost never the case for headers and such. New York Times or CNN have fancy logos/headlines, but we don't want to reproduce them each time we refer to the company or specific article - we just want the content. text-transform is a great way to achieve presentation need (bold headlines) without messing up content. Copying - excepting cases of visual copying, e.g. screenshot - should always have an option of content-only copying.

Re: Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting Them Down Themselves

#13

Post by gaius »

itomato wrote: post #9
carlchenet wrote: post #7

A real hacker move would be to just leave Twitter and go to Mastodon https://joinmastodon.org

How is that anything but abandonment?

You say that like Twitter declaring bankruptcy would be a bad thing

Re: Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting Them Down Themselves

#14

Post by westurner »

carlchenet wrote: post #7

A real hacker move would be to just leave Twitter and go to Mastodon https://joinmastodon.org

Are you suggesting that Mastodon has a better system for identifying harassment, spam, and spam accounts? Or that, given that they're mostly friendly early adopters, they haven't yet encountered the problem?

Re: Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting Them Down Themselves

#15

Post by westurner »

obblekk wrote: post #6

This is an interesting approach. Maybe Twitter shouldn't solve the fake accounts problem directly, maybe they should come up with an evaluation criteria and then create a market for identifying fake accounts. If their evaluation criteria is good, they could get away with 0 cost to build the best possible system (motivated by competition on a market).

There's an open call for papers/proposals for handling the deluge. "Funding will be provided as an unrestricted gift to the proposer's organization(s)" ... "Twitter Health Metrics Proposal Submission" https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/company/2018/...

Re: Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting Them Down Themselves

#16

Post by downvote_shit »

dang wrote: post #3
tuespetre wrote: post #2

LOUD NOISES What’s with the all-caps title? Did they spit it out from the server using ToUpperCase instead of using CSS text-transform?

No, it's that some article titles use all-caps typography and then HN users copy it. We're going to write a bit of software to convert these, or at least ask submitters to revise them. In the meantime we've edited the title above.

Meanwhile, the downvotes are bullshit downvotes. Got a fix for that?

Re: Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting Them Down Themselves

#17

Post by kzrdude »

carlchenet wrote: post #7

A real hacker move would be to just leave Twitter and go to Mastodon https://joinmastodon.org

A real activist would pull out in the forest and start their own society. :)

Sometimes we need to fix the things that are broken instead of leaving.

Re: Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting Them Down Themselves

#18

Post by seviu »

hinkley wrote: post #11
johnc1231 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Twitter's biggest problem with fake accounts is not that they are hard to identify, but that if they do identify them and shut them down, it'll hurt their "number of active users" stats

Their Perverse Incentive is probably to shut down fake accounts faster than they are created. Such that they are 90% effective in, say, 5 years so that the active users takes a haircut instead of a big drop.

I used to work for a company where we were explicitly told not to remove the bots as active visits because it would hurt the figures we were giving our customers. For The PM team having so much traffic was a blessing regardless where it came from. Not same problem as fake accounts but still similar.

Re: Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting Them Down Themselves

#19

Post by qwerty_asdf »

kzrdude wrote: post #17
carlchenet wrote: post #7

A real hacker move would be to just leave Twitter and go to Mastodon https://joinmastodon.org

A real activist would pull out in the forest and start their own society. :) Sometimes we need to fix the things that are broken instead of leaving.

Ah, the bland words of a milquetoast centrist reformer.

Revolution on the internet is a victimless crime.

Re: Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting Them Down Themselves

#20

Post by kzrdude »

> (“jakten” means “hunt” in Norwegian)

I don't mind the confusion, it's just a fact that we can use knowledge of Norwegian to understand Swedish.

Fun fact, same word as yacht, which is borrowed from dutch jacht with the same meaning as Swedish and Norwegian jakt.

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