Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number

#391

Post by Daishiman » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 7:43 PM UTC

syshum wrote: post #310

Daishiman wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait so you don't actively participate in Twitter and yet you feel entitled to give a valid opinion about how the abuse works? Cause let me tell you, the number of accounts I've seen whose commentd get overrun with bots is not trivial at all.

and you know they were bots how?

They give away themselves fairly easy:

* Random meaningless names like "lucy2342", "23markbeard" * No profile picture or a very obviosly random picture * Generic descriptions that dictate obvious political alignment like "Mother. Southwest USA, Republican, MAGA!" * No original content in their timeline except for retweets of political articles from garbage content farms * Really bad English grammar for whenever the bot requires human intervention.

They generally brigade tweets and have a complete lack of interests outside of this narrow activity.

Re: Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number

#392

Post by miohtama » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 11:20 PM UTC

sparkie wrote: post #381

miohtama wrote: post #107

Here is a Google research paper on how adding the phone number verification will affect the cost of bot user account on black markets: static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en/us/pubs/archive/43134.pdf

What it doesn't include: The cost of the users you will lose because you have a dog shit user experience blocking people before they even get to sample your service.

An excellent point. Do you know any studies that would a price tag on this?

Re: Twitter forces all new users to enter a valid phone number

#393

Post by sparkie » Thu, Mar 28, 2019, 4:16 PM UTC

miohtama wrote: post #392

sparkie wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What it doesn't include: The cost of the users you will lose because you have a dog shit user experience blocking people before they even get to sample your service.

An excellent point. Do you know any studies that would a price tag on this?

You can't put a price on it. Imagine, for example, if when Donald Trump was signing up for Twitter, he got irked off and decided to use a different platform instead. That's potentially 60M people using your competitor. Poor user experience can decide the entire success or failure of your service or product.

People generally have too much tolerance because they've been programmed to accept bad user experience as normal. Services which require you to confirm an email are the typical example.

Imagine a door salesman came to your door, pitched you a product, but before you discussed any price or subscription, they ask "please can you go and get a shovel while I take a dump on your doorstep?" Well, that's the kind of experience people get online.