Twitter is depressing now. I mean It is desperate and wholly unsatisfying. - I get the funny stuff from Reddit and my breaking news from the New York Times so other than that it is just like finding a dead baby bird on the side walk. That is the way I feel when I open twitter.com
Twitter suspended our Open Data project's account and wiped all our followers
51–60 of 154 posts
Re: Twitter suspended our Open Data project's account and wiped all our followers
#52Another casualty of betting business on someone else's platform.
USE someone else's platforms for what they're good at - gather leads and connections and steering them to the platform you own.
OWN your data.
Re: Twitter suspended our Open Data project's account and wiped all our followers
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most likely, but then I wonder, what do their 1k-5k (according to CrunchBase) employees really do? A simple spam flagging system (that’ll take care of the lowest hanging fruit aka very obvious spam) can be built even by a single engineer.
I see comments like this coming up on Hacker News almost every month and I tend to think that people who make these comments are either too young and/or have not worked for a mid-sized to a large company. If you have worked in any company that deals with internet-facing traffic serving the size of audience that Twitter does, it should be obvious that 1k employees is nothing if you want to have all the necessary teams…
I've worked for a number of internet companies (including half of FANG), and to be honest, if they wanted to clean up a lot of this stuff by having one or two data scientists tackling low-hanging fruit it would go a long way.
Typically it doesn't happen because it's more profitable to use data scientists to sell more ads.
Re: Twitter suspended our Open Data project's account and wiped all our followers
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would that be different from the existing spam flagging system?
Well the existing system doesn’t seem to be working right. Blatantly obvious spam is allowed to remain, just see the spam replies to any big account’s tweets or spam on certain popular hashtags.
Or the existing system works as designed but your suggestion of a "simple spam flagging system that could be written by one engineer" is not a sufficient solution. (And keep in mind that any anti-spam tools will be definitely abused be trolls and other malicious actors to harass innocent users)
Re: Twitter suspended our Open Data project's account and wiped all our followers
#55I would assume Twitter suspended the account due to the rate of posts. Granted, you are allowed 2400 tweets per day, [1] so the account should not have had any issues.... [1]: https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-limit...
I think the image-post all-caps multi-level text followed by a link with just a number at the end might have been spammy looking to a crap machine learning algorithm
Asimov's zeroth Law of Robotics:
> A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
Causing data loss from a poorly-trained robot's incorrect call is unacceptable. Fix your bits, Twitter.
Re: Twitter suspended our Open Data project's account and wiped all our followers
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whoever designed how this system is supposed to work (as in, allow the spam to remain) is still an idiot in my view. Granted, I’m sure they have an agenda to justify this (aka boost user numbers as much as possible, even if all of them are bots) but as a user I don’t care - I see spam on the platform and I call them out for it.
> Whoever designed how this system is supposed to work (as in, allow the spam to remain) is still an idiot in my view Why? If you don't know what the goal is, how can you judge the results? Just because you don't care for the result doesn't make the person who designed the system an idiot. It makes you an idiot for continuing to use a system you hate.
I never said I used the system. I deleted my account in 2013 when they started making the platform worse and worse with every “upgrade”.
I loved Twitter and I wish they get their stuff together and make it enjoyable again, but I’m not expecting anything anymore. They’re most likely going to go down the same way Yahoo did.
Re: Twitter suspended our Open Data project's account and wiped all our followers
#57A similar thing happened to a much bigger, also innocent, account recently:
https://kotaku.com/nintendo-fan-account-flagged-on-twitter-f...
Re: Twitter suspended our Open Data project's account and wiped all our followers
#58Another casualty of betting business on someone else's platform. USE someone else's platforms for what they're good at - gather leads and connections and steering them to the platform you own. OWN your data.
They do own their data; that doesn’t change anything to the problem of Twitter closing their account. They use it as a communication medium; not a storage one.
Re: Twitter suspended our Open Data project's account and wiped all our followers
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whoever designed how this system is supposed to work (as in, allow the spam to remain) is still an idiot in my view. Granted, I’m sure they have an agenda to justify this (aka boost user numbers as much as possible, even if all of them are bots) but as a user I don’t care - I see spam on the platform and I call them out for it.
> Whoever designed how this system is supposed to work (as in, allow the spam to remain) is still an idiot in my view Why? If you don't know what the goal is, how can you judge the results? Just because you don't care for the result doesn't make the person who designed the system an idiot. It makes you an idiot for continuing to use a system you hate.
AI bugs are the new plausible deniability. You think this is a mess now? Wait till we get robotic AI weapons everywhere.
Re: Twitter suspended our Open Data project's account and wiped all our followers
#60I love it how they have “automated systems that remove spam” that somehow remove innocent accounts like this one but completely fail to remove blatantly obvious spam. I don’t expect the system to be bulletproof and remove advanced spam rings, but when obvious spam is allowed to stay on the platform I’m wondering what the idiots at Twitter are really doing.
The curves of false-acceptance vs false-rejection rates usually overlap, even in their optimum. I do not envy a billion-user-level website like Twitter having to deal with this. Automation is probably still better than trying to do this manually and failing even more? Who knows, though.