341–350 of 393 posts
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This is an interesting idea. Doubles as a strategy for monetizing.
From an accounting perspective in this hypothetical scenario I believe that you would not be legally allowed to dip into the deposit money save for that recovered through bans. Which creates very perverse incentives.
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This is slightly different though, twitter is silly and unnecessary - access to your money is not. During some of the recent shows highlighting issues with payday lending these sorts of strategic delays were mentioned in the light that they can cause irregularly paid workers to have problems actually getting money out of their paycheck - forcing them into more borrowing until they are able to clear their checks. Agai…
Eh. It is the primary communication mode for the current US president.
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Stock chrome on an Android phone. Most often from a Twitter link on HN. I'd say I get an error 90+% on the first try, and the refresh usually works the first time... occasionally, I need to do two. Bone stock phone, nothing notable about it or the browser. Doesn't happen on my Windows or Linux desktops.
Why would you run stock chrome on android? Use a privacy respecting browser like firefox or Brave and install an ad-blocker like Ublock before browsing the web. Chrome does not respect user privacy and is designed to not support add-ons as it will hurt Google's core advertising business.
They have been doing this for any account registered from a VPN or Tor. However, you can simply appeal the block and tell them you haven't tweeted and not broken any rules. They will send you an automated mail, offering to validate your phone number, or reply to the mail if your problem is not solved. Just reply to the mail. Unfortunately, processing the request takes anywhere between 10 minutes and 2 weeks; usually…
Just give them a fake telephone number: https://receive-smss.com/
They have been doing this for any account registered from a VPN or Tor. However, you can simply appeal the block and tell them you haven't tweeted and not broken any rules. They will send you an automated mail, offering to validate your phone number, or reply to the mail if your problem is not solved. Just reply to the mail. Unfortunately, processing the request takes anywhere between 10 minutes and 2 weeks; usually…
Simply, easily, trivial. With just a little effort. Try again often, try again later. No problem, to appeal, the process, Mr.Kafka, all you have to do is, be seen by two witnesses, to uphold your interest in.. Of course, if that is to complicated, and the nuances of the wording, are a endless stream of passive agressive insults to your intelect. Noone can help you, because there is noone home. The company you are try…
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There isn't any good way to maintain perfect privacy while also rejecting bots/trolls with 20 accounts.
There is proof of stake. You stake some moderate amount ($25), refundable at any time but forfeit if you spam. For a non-spammer it effectively costs nothing but the spammer loses their stake for every spam someone reports, and every spam posted against the same stake can be disabled at once. The requirement obviously being the ability to make small anonymous payments.
I think it would be great for Twitter if they could get away from the advertising model. If holding a Twitter account required holding a share of Twitter stock, I wonder if users could end up owning the platform?
I'm assuming it's to try de-anonymize users and make bots less cost effective. Nothing propagates faster than hate on Twitter and seeing as it's being actively weaponized to spread propaganda, I'm all for new measures that try slow the spread down - esp. given nothing else has worked thus far.
You can rent really mobile phones in China for 5cents or so, up to 20cents for EU and other countries which will probably have a better success rate.
It is not going to stop bots
The other component is that once they have the phone number, they can do anything with it they want, unless you leave the network. E.g. facebook once did the same, they required phone numbers "for two factor authentication". They promised to not use the numbers for anything else. A few years later they started sending SMS spam to users about what their friends did on facebook, and now facebook users can enter the num…
> Your only choice as individual user is to leave the platform. That's not even enough anymore. You also have to make sure that every one of your contacts do not upload their address book to conveniently find friends like you who may or may not be on the network. And that they don't tag you in images, events, etc. You're an entry in the Facebook database, whether you have or have had an active profile or not.
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How else would you suggest they combat spam? How do you receive a verification SMS on a public phone booth? Most actual humans have a phone number, and Twitter wants a semi-1:1 mapping between human and Twitter account. Spammers have hundreds. This seems like a reasonable way to greatly increase the cost of making accounts for spammers.
How else would you suggest they combat spam? Disable the account temporarily when some (small) number of other users flags its posts as spam. If a user is discovered to be filing false spam reports, disable that account. Accounts without a history of posting legitimate tweets should be rate-limited in both their posting and reporting privileges. Externalizing the costs of fighting spam and "propaganda" (whatever that…
I'm not sure you're really hearing us.
The advertisers don't want their ads connected to spam or propaganda posts AT ALL. If Twitter actually shows the post, and then has ads along side it, it's too late. I mean it's great that someone bothers to flag that post as spam, but the advertiser's Twitter firehose processor is going to detect that pairing. Under your proposed regime the advertiser would be constantly detecting violations by spam users who were not being punished by Twitter. Under Twitter's proposed regime, the advertiser would report the first violation and the user, and his/her posts, would be gone. On top of that, there would be far fewer occurrences of such matches in the firehose data in the first place because accounts would be more difficult to create. Now add to all that the fact that the spammer would have to get a new burner phone to create a new account. That cost, coupled with the fact that each account could only pull off limited spamming means less profit for the spammer.
Put another way, the ROI of each new account tends toward zero under Twitter's model. Under your model, the ROI is bounded only by chance. That chance being the chance that enough people bother to mark the post as spam. Here's the thing though, what if they don't? What if the first Twitter hears about the spam is from the advertiser? Being in that situation is what Twitter is trying to keep to a minimum. That is the nightmare scenario that they live in today. Today they are in that situation several hundred times per week. Those are uncomfortable calls. (Probably hundreds per day by now? I haven't checked in a while.) With their new system, over time, I could see that going to ten to a hundred a week. (Maybe even lower if you add automated firehose processing for advertisers on the backend.)
They say "The customer is always right." Well, for Twitter, the customer is the advertiser.
We're going this way as well (requiring & verifying phone numbers, not locking accounts). We don't have a problem with bots, but users in the "not so tech savvy" segment tend to switch/discard/forget their email address. Rather than try to recover their account with us, this group will subsequently just create a new one, and then wonder & complain that their profiles/settings/content/histories aren't carried over. We…