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

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

#71

Post by edent »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #14

So what's the current feeling on HN towards stories like this one? They seem fairly repetitive and uninteresting: users use something with no customer service, automated system goes haywire and bans/blocks/disables/inconveniences their account, the only way they have to get it resolved is to make some noise about it, they then return to using the service, nothing changes. At this point I'm tempted to flag stories lik…

I posted it here for a few reasons. One of which that someone from Twitter might see it and fix it.

The other is to remind all the startups which frequent this site that their actions have consequences.

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

#72

Post by jnbiche »

modsec wrote: post #34
Rjevski wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most likely, but then I wonder, what do their 1k-5k (according to CrunchBase) employees really do? A simple spam flagging system (that’ll take care of the lowest hanging fruit aka very obvious spam) can be built even by a single engineer.

I see comments like this coming up on Hacker News almost every month and I tend to think that people who make these comments are either too young and/or have not worked for a mid-sized to a large company. If you have worked in any company that deals with internet-facing traffic serving the size of audience that Twitter does, it should be obvious that 1k employees is nothing if you want to have all the necessary teams…

Before being acquired by Facebook, WhatsApp was supporting 900 million users with only 50 employees. So it can be done if you know what you're doing, run a robust tech stack, and don't worry about customer service (and to be clear, Twitter doesn't do customer service, either).

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

#73

Post by _dcwr »

modsec wrote: post #34
Rjevski wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most likely, but then I wonder, what do their 1k-5k (according to CrunchBase) employees really do? A simple spam flagging system (that’ll take care of the lowest hanging fruit aka very obvious spam) can be built even by a single engineer.

I see comments like this coming up on Hacker News almost every month and I tend to think that people who make these comments are either too young and/or have not worked for a mid-sized to a large company. If you have worked in any company that deals with internet-facing traffic serving the size of audience that Twitter does, it should be obvious that 1k employees is nothing if you want to have all the necessary teams…

Just last month Krebs got told by Facebook report system carding is welcome content on Facebook: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/04/is-facebooks-anti-abuse-...

I've reported someone leaking Polish court documents of an ongoing case on Facebook - nothing happened.

I've reported a YouTube video praising Anders Breivik as an European hero defending whites from Marxists, Leftists and Muslims - it's still up.

I've created a Twitter account and it got instantly locked for being 'suspicious' or 'automated' (but of course giving them my phone number would fix it instantly) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014511

What are the nuances that I'm missing?

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

#74

Post by AlphaWeaver »

There's a fair bit of criticism for relying too much on Twitter in this thread, but I think the article brings up a good point:

>Yes, I know. We should redecentralize and put our content on Mastodon, or the BlockChain, or some other convoluted platform which has no users. But that’s just not practical for a small project. We have limited technical resources and have to go to where the people are.

Despite there being better technical options, those options can't be considered just on their technical merits... User adoption is also crucial.

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

#75

Post by jimnotgym »

Rjevski wrote: post #2

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

Is spam a problem for Twitter users?

It is bots and the algorithmic timeline (which Twitter spam with lots of people i don't follow) that ruined it for me. The bot issue seems simpler to solve than spam, (a Turing test?) and I can only think that Twitter feel the bots will one day make them profitable.

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

#76

Post by JoshTriplett »

ksenzee wrote: post #43
pound wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you know how to reliably solve that easy problem I'm pretty sure they're hiring

Solving that particular problem is not hard: trash any reply to a celebrity or viral tweet that includes a link and gets reported x times. There was a good Twitter thread on this recently, pointing out that we look for complicated solutions when simple ones would do. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/987602838594445312.html

> Solving that particular problem is not hard: trash any reply to a celebrity or viral tweet that includes a link and gets reported x times.

That's trivial to abuse, given a group of accounts filing false reports.

That's not a hypothetical; as an example, Facebook's reporting functionality has been abused to attack people's accounts as part of various hate campaigns.

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

#77

Post by ghostly_s »

nradov wrote: post #47
thaumaturgy wrote: post #14

So what's the current feeling on HN towards stories like this one? They seem fairly repetitive and uninteresting: users use something with no customer service, automated system goes haywire and bans/blocks/disables/inconveniences their account, the only way they have to get it resolved is to make some noise about it, they then return to using the service, nothing changes. At this point I'm tempted to flag stories lik…

While repetitive, these stories serve as a useful reminder that Twitter management is still just as incompetent as ever, and no one should rely on their service for anything important.

Right these stories are "repetitive" because these companies continue to be shitty at what they do. That fact itself is something everyone reading this site should be keeping abreast of.

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

#78

Post by [deleted] »

edent wrote: post #67
parliament32 wrote: post #12

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

We don't. We syndicate to Twitter. That's where we get the most new users. All the data is on openbenches.org and GitHub.

[deleted]

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

#79

Post by jordigh »

AlphaWeaver wrote: post #74

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

User adoption on Mastodon can be pretty big depending on the project. Look at the number of followers F-Droid has on Mastodon compared to Twitter.

https://mastodon.technology/@fdroidorg

https://twitter.com/fdroidorg

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

#80

Post by Rjevski »

empath75 wrote: post #63
ksenzee wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solving that particular problem is not hard: trash any reply to a celebrity or viral tweet that includes a link and gets reported x times. There was a good Twitter thread on this recently, pointing out that we look for complicated solutions when simple ones would do. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/987602838594445312.html

If you’re relying on reports that can be gamed.

> Automated systems can and will be gamed as well.

Taking an user’s reputation, account lifetime, reputation of their followers, etc (so for example, a report from a new account has less weight than an established account with a good history) will sort that out.

And when everything else fails, a proper appeals system where you talk to humans will solve this problem once and for all. False positives and abuse are bound to happen eventually, but they’re tolerable as long as you have a proper appeals process to deal with them.

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