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

openbenches.org

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

#81

Post by _b8r0 »

modsec wrote: post #9
overcast wrote: post #3

I'm saying it again, don't build a business based on someone else's data. At any point it could disappear, along with you.

What's a good alternative you would suggest? I often have a similar problem and the fact is that most users hang out on platforms that suck like Twitter, Facebook, etc. If I build my business on a decentralized platform like blockchain etc. I immediately lose 90% or even more of my target audience. If I build my business on my own datacenter the cost and maintenance involved is staggeringly high. Do you have a reason…

They had, in their own words hundreds of followers.

At the time of this comment, the fediverse has about 1.2 million accounts. It's not that hard to get hundreds of followers there.

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

#82

Post by edent »

overcast wrote: post #3

I'm saying it again, don't build a business based on someone else's data. At any point it could disappear, along with you.

Our data is fine. All cloud hosted and available on GitHub.

What we've lost is our social graph. That's not something which can easily be decentralised.

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

#83

Post by danudey »

ropeadopepope wrote: post #24
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.

> I’m wondering what the idiots at Twitter are really doing. What if they're not idiots? What if that system is working exactly as intended?

This is a good point. Maybe Twitter finds that these changes are driving away people who don't monetize as much and appealing to the people who do. Much like Fox News found that scummy "buy gold now!" / "sell your gold now!" ads worked well for their audience, maybe this is what engages people.

I mean, it works for spam. Obvious bad english, poor spelling and punctuation, etc. weed out people who know this is an obvious scam, leaving only the type of people who will overlook every red flag imaginable because their gullibility and greed overwhelms them.

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

#84

Post by edent »

peterwwillis wrote: post #18
enzanki_ars wrote: post #10

I would assume Twitter suspended the account due to the rate of posts. Granted, you are allowed 2400 tweets per day, [1] so the account should not have had any issues.... [1]: https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-limit...

I think the image-post all-caps multi-level text followed by a link with just a number at the end might have been spammy looking to a crap machine learning algorithm

That's possible. We get the text from Google's OCR product - and a lot of benches are in all caps.

We could try to shift it all to sentence case, but that might lose the meaning of proper nouns.

Thanks for the suggestion though, that's the first thing which has made sense about the banning.

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

#85

Post by edent »

peterwwillis wrote: post #25

Unrelated: Openbenches, you don't have a single picture of the greatest benches in America? http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/...

Haha! If you can take a photo and upload it, we'll gladly put it on the map.

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

#86

Post by Rjevski »

komali2 wrote: post #70
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.

Hold on, I've reported multiple extraordinarily obvious spam rings before, with accounts as old as 2013, and I've even kicked up a stink here when Twitter employees show up, and I was told "bots don't violate the TOS." I just checked, it's still there https://mobile.twitter.com/ksfAKBARI check followers/following for a massive ring of obvious spam.

Could everyone who has a Twitter account report some of those? Just to see if a pile of reports from mostly influential accounts (we’re on HN after all) would have any effect.

Here’s a screenshot of the account just in case this actually works: https://i.imgur.com/xNviClq.png

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

#87

Post by foo101 »

jnbiche wrote: post #72
modsec wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

So why do you think they had to grow from 50 employees to beyond 1k employees?

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

#88

Post by TomMarius »

ghostly_s wrote: post #66
overcast wrote: post #3

I'm saying it again, don't build a business based on someone else's data. At any point it could disappear, along with you.

At whom is this directed? The organization that posted this story, which appears to be a nonprofit civic hobby project?

There isn't much difference between a nonprofit and a business regarding things like this

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

#89

Post by stingraycharles »

jordigh wrote: post #79
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

I know of absolutely no people that use Mastadon. There might be a niche somewhere that uses it, but I can’t help to think that it would hurt rather than help any hobby project to choose Mastadon over Twitter.

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

#90

Post by magissima »

jordigh wrote: post #79
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

I think this is evidence of how much lower the bar is on Mastodon. 2k followers is insignificant on Twitter, irrespective of how few followers F-Droid has there.
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