Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting Them Down Themselves
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Re: Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting Them Down Themselves
#2LOUD NOISES
What’s with the all-caps title? Did they spit it out from the server using ToUpperCase instead of using CSS text-transform?
Re: Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting Them Down Themselves
#3LOUD 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.
Re: Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting Them Down Themselves
#4A related discussion from a couple days ago is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16599802.
Re: Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting Them Down Themselves
#5LOUD 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.
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 with different stylesheets should produce the same text content on the page for the user to copy.
[1]: The markup is in something approaching title case, except that words like `with` are also capitalized. Then the element is using `text-transform: uppercase`.
Re: Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting Them Down Themselves
#6This 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).
Re: Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting Them Down Themselves
#7A real hacker move would be to just leave Twitter and go to Mastodon https://joinmastodon.org
Re: Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting Them Down Themselves
#8A real hacker move would be to just leave Twitter and go to Mastodon https://joinmastodon.org
Maybe even use your hacker powers to spin up a Mastodon instance of your own so your friends have somewhere to go where they know the person running it.
Re: Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting Them Down Themselves
#9A real hacker move would be to just leave Twitter and go to Mastodon https://joinmastodon.org
How is that anything but abandonment?
Re: Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting Them Down Themselves
#10This 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