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An account was suspended

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Re: An account was suspended

#131

Post by themitigating »

impossiblefork wrote: post #91
Zak wrote: post #18

I suspect this kind of problem is unavoidable when a large fraction of the world uses a centralized many-to-many communication platform. Moderation is always going to be a cost center for such a platform and there's a big gap between good enough moderation to prevent a mass exodus and what most of us would likely call good . Using decentralized tools might improve the situation.

It doesn't need to be centralized though, and I think centralization is the cause of both the moral problems (political bans, censorship, etc.) and the difficulties running these things. Without centralization it's just some kind of trust network, and since the messages are open it's a much easier problem to filter away unwanted material than to deal with things like e-mail spam. The reason people don't is simply tha…

I'm not sure if you meant it the way I read it but "people" could also be users. The bigger the service the bigger the audience.

Also, who was banned from twitter because of their politics?

Re: An account was suspended

#132

Post by themitigating »

Zak wrote: post #18

I suspect this kind of problem is unavoidable when a large fraction of the world uses a centralized many-to-many communication platform. Moderation is always going to be a cost center for such a platform and there's a big gap between good enough moderation to prevent a mass exodus and what most of us would likely call good . Using decentralized tools might improve the situation.

Why would a decentralized system not run into these problems?

Re: An account was suspended

#133

Post by danso »

From a tweet later in the thread:

https://twitter.com/benthompson/status/1583062865116041229

> For the record, this is 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. So on one hand, I get it.

I think everyone can agree that Twitter's bot detection could be a bit more diligent, but what Ben describes seems like exactly the kind of thing an automated system should detect and ban without prejudice:

- A day old account

- A brand new account tweeting at a rate as fast as 1 per minute

- every tweet has a outbound URL

- while Twitter allows you to register automated bots [0] that use the developer's API, the StratecheryINT account apparently sent its tweets using the standard "Twitter Web App" -- e.g. likely an automated script using Selenium. If Ben had gone the approved bot route, I wonder if the account would've been sanctioned. As it is, faking web submissions probably triggers Twitter's auto detection even worse.

> Crypto spamming with Elon Musk's avatar? Not a bot! Stratechery Interviews? NO TWEET FOR YOU

As someone who's been an occasional reply guy to Elon over the years, I can say that the spambot filtering has gotten much better. Even when I send out a loaded tweet (i.e. mentioning "hacked wallet opensea NFT where can i buy the tshirt"), very few bots will show up, as opposed to dozens within the first 15 seconds.

I humbly submit that Ben hasn't looked in closely at what he thinks is bot activity. A lot of crypto spam tweets are either hacked legitimate accounts, or if relatively new, sent via iPhone/Android. Also a lot of spammy activity is actually real people -- a lot of humans don't take twitter seriously, or thoughtfully. Either way, all of this is much less obvious to filter out than how Ben describes StratecheryINT was operated.

edit: You can play the spam detection game yourself. Do a search "to:elonmusk url:https://\" and sort by latest [1]

For example, this @hameedforreal [2] account is almost definitely a crypto spammer, and likely was never a "real" person. But you can see that the account at least tweets from "Twitter for iPhone" (don't know if there's a way to fake that other than operating an actual iPhone).

If it's from an authentic single iphone (as opposed to a selenium script via distributed AWS), what would the very obvious and scalable heuristics be for auto-banning this account on tweet activity alone? The fact that so many of the tweets are replies with the exact same content? Well, there are a lot of real people who have burst activity like that -- think of fundraisers and activism. Avoiding false positives over millions of possible "bots" is very hard.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/16/twitter-officially-launche...

[1] https://twitter.com/search?q=to%3Aelonmusk%20url%3Ahttps%3A%...

[2] https://twitter.com/hameedforreal\

Re: An account was suspended

#134

Post by 1123581321 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #67

I'm a big fan of Ben Thompson, and I'm not necessarily on Twitter's side here, but this to me seems more like a case of Ben whining about "Spam is when someone else sends it". From his own words, this "Stratechery Interviews" account was a new account that only sent out tweets of links from multiple locations around the world. In other words, the only thing really distinguishing it from spam on a technical level is t…

I don’t think you’re familiar with this use of Twitter. Since accounts can’t easily be partially followed by certain keywords or hashtags, creators will create additional accounts as notification channels for some of their content that their audience can choose to follow. It’s not spam because the delivery is wanted by those following the account. These channels don’t try to engage accounts that are uninterested in them.

Is that useful account hard to disambiguate from a spam account? Yes, but that’s Twitter’s job here.

Look at email. People get tons of notification-only email that are little more than links. Email providers simply have to figure out how to block spam without blocking legitimate email, and they largely have. Social has the same obligation.

Re: An account was suspended

#135

Post by trillic »

alfiedotwtf wrote: post #15
michaelmcdonald wrote: post #2

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.

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.

I might be better off if my hacker news account was permanently banned

Re: An account was suspended

#136

Post by sebastialonso »

rurban wrote: post #106
jagtesh wrote: post #101

Facebook (the social app) and Google (Ads, Play Store, etc) are no different. I’ve read countless accounts from many individuals and small/independent app developers about their accounts being suspended or terminated with little to no means of redressal. I will go on to say that this remains a generally unsolved problem for companies working at scale that are under scrutiny and dealing with financial or social fraud.…

> Amazon is another prime example of a company that does customer service well - though that might have some consequences on their work culture (mistakes are not easily forgiven - since the cost is so high). Certainly not. In fact they have one of the most incompetent customer services. When I changed my bank account, they didn't change my bank account, but rather created a new user with the new bank data. Then when…

Beware of anecdotical arguments, they aren't arguments.

Re: An account was suspended

#137

Post by themitigating »

nfriedly wrote: post #51
Zak wrote: post #18

I suspect this kind of problem is unavoidable when a large fraction of the world uses a centralized many-to-many communication platform. Moderation is always going to be a cost center for such a platform and there's a big gap between good enough moderation to prevent a mass exodus and what most of us would likely call good . Using decentralized tools might improve the situation.

I think the problem is less that they temporarily banned his account, it's more that the language of the message was completely false. There was no "careful review", and it was not permanent. Also, as others have pointed out, "suspension" implies that the interruption is temporary, so "permanently suspended" doesn't even make sense.

If you wanted to suspend a user's account for a period of time you would say "suspended for two weeks". What if you wanted to suspend a user forever but it might have been a mistake or you might change your mind?

Re: An account was suspended

#138

Post by manimino »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #70
selykg wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No Twitter account for me after several run ins with just shitty people being shit. I'm not going to say it was life changing, but it is stress that is now gone. Would highly recommend to anyone that has higher stress levels, it's possible SOME of it is coming from your social media use. In my case, it was work that was the big cause, but, removing myself from social media resulted in a noticeable improvement.

You have to be aware of the origins of the stress and they are likely many. Even here on HN I find myself making the decision to not continue to engage with someone who's responded to one of my posts because I can already predict it's going to race down a rabbit hole of pointless arguments. It's simply not worth talking to some people. I think part of the problem is that people don't realize that a lot of what they a…

This is a good policy in general. Say everything you want to say in one comment, and do not reply back to anything. Replies are where people start getting defensive.

Even if the discussion is friendly, once you've said your piece, it is usually best to let others reply. The discussion gets better the more unique perspectives are in it.

Same goes for meetings, ideally.

Re: An account was suspended

#139

Post by matthewdgreen »

michaelmcdonald wrote: post #2

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.

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.

Re: An account was suspended

#140

Post by josephcsible »

psychphysic wrote: post #79
breck wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find Twitter amazing. (though I'm currently suspended again - 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.

But why do you keep getting suspended?

This is basically unanswerable by anyone except Twitter employees, since nobody else has any insight into their banning algorithm.
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