I mean... we are the best of the best of the best, top of the class when it comes to technology and especially creative solutions enabled by technology. We have world-leading machine learning capabilities and hundreds of engineers working around the clock for money that, not that long ago, would have been completely unheard of. We have talent. We have time. We have money. We have passion. We have absolute shitloads o…
>We're the best software engineers the world has ever seen Maybe some of you are, but people like me read HN too ;-)
As with my estimate of real-world influencers on HN ("a handful"), I'd suggest there's probably the same amount of "world best software engineers" on HN (and no, I'm definitely not including myself in that.)
I am not sure why this is a problem, but I don't really use twitter. Yes, fake accounts exist. It's only twitter's problem not sure why this something the NY times would care about?
> not sure why this something the NY times would care about?
They're just looking for any blame they can shift for their culpability in helping throw the 2016 POTUS election to Trump.
That's a different problem though. What if you could do identification that didn't involve giving someone your passport? Authentication adds a potential cost-of-reputation to social media content that you post, which in turn may raise the value of the content. If there were a safe, secure way to do it, then why not?
Oh great, so now we’d be tied down by chains of conformity. How’s that for a surprising change of meaning to the phrase “Global Village”!
Could you explain how you be tied down by chains of conformity?
My understanding of the Tumblr porn content is that they’re usually small clips and I believe under so many seconds doesn’t count under copyright infringement laws. However, nothing would be a problem if it was original content that had waivers and age of consent forms and such on file.
> I believe under so many seconds doesn’t count under copyright infringement laws Careful here. This appears to be referring to the concept of fair use, but firstly there are multiple criteria used to judge fair use ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#U.S._fair_use_factors ), secondly these criteria are (intentionally) subjective and up to a judge's interpretation, and thirdly fair use is US-only.
The term fair use is US-only but many nations have similar concepts or concepts that overlap with it. Australia's 'fair dealing' policy allows for the use of copyrighted material without seeking approval if its purpose is in satire, research, reviewing, media criticism, or news reporting, for example. What's notable there is that length or amount used aren't as important, which has some positive effects but also some important negative ones (it would not be possible to create Google in Australia because taking the summary snippets and image thumbnails has no legal justification). Interestingly in the last big debate over loosening Australian copyright law and adopting broader fair use, the American MPAA was the biggest funder of opposition efforts.
are there services out there which curate the channels available to insure quality and content? Say if I wanted to follow a particular sport or team, are there services which can set it up? Same goes for any subject
> Say if I wanted to follow a particular sport or team, are there services which can set it up? It's called ESPN.
ESPN only really cover one country. If you're in the US I'm sure it's fine but for everyone else the coverage is not only almost nonexistent but often factually wrong when it does exist. I saw AFL coverage on ESPN where they did not understand the distinction between goals and points and left the wrong scores up for ages.
But these bots exist because some people actually use Twitter as a newsfeed for that sort of thing. And being partly an RSS substitute is surely part of Twitter's business model these days. Not suggesting that many of these accounts weren't still absolute garbage, but the signal/noise ratio isn't always great with obviously human-run accounts either. The other issue is that the distinction between a bot and a human i…
>But these bots exist because some people actually use Twitter as a newsfeed for that sort of thing. I would dispute that. I'd argue that the bots exist because spamming twitter is free. If it costs me $0 and I get even a tiny benefit out of it then it is to my advantage. Its essentially the same problem as spam email.
We tweet the scores of our games automatically from our backend. There's no profit in it, but our members appreciate it based on follows and retweets. That's real people following and retweeting. I actually comb through and remove obviously fake accounts from following us.
I think this is a legitimate use of a bot. We even mention the host club because they want us to.
What's funny is that the account got squelched 3 times before we got a human at twitter to officially prevent us from getting flagged. So they do definitely have some measures in place to prevent spam accounts. I suspect it's become non-trivial to identify all the bad actors.
I have spent several years working on a product ( https://www.rapidcrowd.co ) that cuts through the noise (bots, fake accounts, inactives) of Twitter to find real users that fit related topics - and your rough estimate of 20 real users in 1000 tweets isn't too far off. For this reason, trending topics and keyword search are essentially hijacked features. However, because I believe there are many useful bots that have…
I was signing up for your service until I saw the permissions your app wants. Permission to update my profile? See my DMs? It doesn't explain anywhere I could find why it needs these permissions.
We do not have any application functionality relating to modifying profiles.
We do request access so you can send Direct Messages from your dashboard. We are considering removing that functionality for the sake of privacy.
Unfortunately, the Twitter application permission model is not granular:
>But these bots exist because some people actually use Twitter as a newsfeed for that sort of thing. I would dispute that. I'd argue that the bots exist because spamming twitter is free. If it costs me $0 and I get even a tiny benefit out of it then it is to my advantage. Its essentially the same problem as spam email.
We tweet the scores of our games automatically from our backend. There's no profit in it, but our members appreciate it based on follows and retweets. That's real people following and retweeting. I actually comb through and remove obviously fake accounts from following us. I think this is a legitimate use of a bot. We even mention the host club because they want us to. What's funny is that the account got squelched 3…
That sounds fair. Maybe it’s more of a volume issue. You get one or two ‘bot tweets’ per day without paying.
I know lots of people also use bots for cross posting from Instagram or something else. Or to post when they put a new article up on their site.
I’m sure you’d have to allow them to some degree. But there are some really noisy bots out there that need a fee attached to em.
Speaking as an ex-Facebook growth employee, fake accounts actually hurt growth and are actively sought out and removed by a dedicated team. Think about it--if a user receives a bunch of fake friend requests, it's a bad experience. This is one of the (many) reasons MySpace died--because of the onslaught of porn-promoting accounts that they never cleaned up until it was too late.
Facebook certainly has been more diligent about stomping out fake accounts than most other services, with Twitter being social media's problem child. A telling anecdote: A security researcher friend of mine found a somewhat small botnet of twitter accounts (~7000). Reported it to twitter, a few months passed and he noticed twitter hadn't done anything. So he turned it over to a journalist who eventually poked someone…
WTF? What can account for that? I'm not cynical enough to believe that they _encourage_ botnets.
Maybe simply no dedicated people or team for the problem?