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Twitter suspended our Open Data project's account and wiped all our followers

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Re: Twitter suspended our Open Data project's account and wiped all our followers

#61

Post by kbenson »

crankylinuxuser wrote: post #29
modsec wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> idiots at Twitter A constructive comment would have been to point us at good spam filters that are very good at not allowing obvious spam so that we do not make the same mistake that Twitter did and be labelled as "idiots" by the likes of you on the Internet.

Or, you can spend human time to review a decision like "Delete account with known good history", rather than the current SV trend of 'automate it, fuck it, who cares? We'll wait until someone complains on HN or Reddit' The first rule is you don't delete user data without consent. The second rule, is you dont delete user data without consent! And yes, I work in the industry. Bad shit happens, and data can be lost. But…

> the current SV trend of 'automate it, fuck it, who cares?

I think some of the reason this comes about is that it's deprioritized until it's a major problem, and you're already at a large scale, and then the decision is "require human review, even of what appears to be a fraction of the deletions, and get swamped with thousands or tends of thousands of reviews immediately", or "just delete them".

That's not an excuse for the decision, since obviously they could have taken care to address this problem at least minimally much earlier, and there wouldn't be a deluge of work, but I think we all understand whey they weren't keen to do that (even if it's a crap decision for their users).

Re: Twitter suspended our Open Data project's account and wiped all our followers

#62

Post by thaumaturgy »

extralego wrote: post #36
thaumaturgy wrote: post #14

So what's the current feeling on HN towards stories like this one? They seem fairly repetitive and uninteresting: users use something with no customer service, automated system goes haywire and bans/blocks/disables/inconveniences their account, the only way they have to get it resolved is to make some noise about it, they then return to using the service, nothing changes. At this point I'm tempted to flag stories lik…

I don’t understand the reason for flagging it. I get the impression that you are flagging it for not being novel or unique. I can relate, but that is concerning in itself. The general concern here could not be anymore relevant, and discounting that merely because it lacks novelty seems at least decadent and at most snobery. Without even taking a stance on the issue being discussed, I think we can all agree that these…

The danger with low-effort topics like this is that they can take over a site (see e.g. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tscc3e5eujrsEeFN4/well-kept-...). At a guess, there've been several hundred submissions like this to HN over the years, and yet this is an approach to business that established companies and startups alike continue to follow. There's no sign that any of this noise is changing the actual business practices at all, and the problem is common enough that the /r/videos subreddit has had a "YouTube Drama" tag for certain videos for quite a while now.

But, okay. It looks like the general opinion is that it would be inappropriate to flag them.

Re: Twitter suspended our Open Data project's account and wiped all our followers

#63

Post by empath75 »

ksenzee wrote: post #43
pound wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you know how to reliably solve that easy problem I'm pretty sure they're hiring

Solving that particular problem is not hard: trash any reply to a celebrity or viral tweet that includes a link and gets reported x times. There was a good Twitter thread on this recently, pointing out that we look for complicated solutions when simple ones would do. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/987602838594445312.html

If you’re relying on reports that can be gamed.

Re: Twitter suspended our Open Data project's account and wiped all our followers

#64

Post by ropeadopepope »

Rjevski wrote: post #56
ropeadopepope wrote: post #50

Earlier 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 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.

> They’re most likely going to go down the same way Yahoo did.

Unlikely. Yahoo actually had to make a profit. In 12 years, Twitter has only reported 1 profitable quarter. And yet, somebody (or somebodies) keep forking over billions of dollars to keep twitter up and running. Whatever their goal is, making money isn't it.

My guess is their goal is the same as the major media outlets: to control the flow of information. It's a lot easier to do that without scrutiny if the tools appear to kick people off at random. The harder it is to discern a pattern, the less scrutiny they'll face when taking down accounts that say things they don't like. It also provides cover if there's a big stink and they have to reinstate an account.

Re: Twitter suspended our Open Data project's account and wiped all our followers

#65

Post by Rjevski »

enzanki_ars wrote: post #10

I 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...

They should actually put that report button to good use and take that into account when suspending users. A high number of tweeets seen by a lot of active followers and not being reported is actually a very good signal the account is not spamming.

Re: Twitter suspended our Open Data project's account and wiped all our followers

#66

Post by ghostly_s »

overcast wrote: post #3

I'm saying it again, don't build a business based on someone else's data. At any point it could disappear, along with you.

At whom is this directed? The organization that posted this story, which appears to be a nonprofit civic hobby project?

Re: Twitter suspended our Open Data project's account and wiped all our followers

#67

Post by edent »

parliament32 wrote: post #12

An "open data project" that stores all of its data on Twitter? Not that Twitter's in the right here, but this seems like a bad move...

We don't. We syndicate to Twitter. That's where we get the most new users.

All the data is on openbenches.org and GitHub.

Re: Twitter suspended our Open Data project's account and wiped all our followers

#68

Post by edent »

enzanki_ars wrote: post #10

I 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...

We don't get anywhere near that. On a good day we might get 100.

Re: Twitter suspended our Open Data project's account and wiped all our followers

#69

Post by ghostly_s »

gesman wrote: post #52

Another 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.

Please read the story before commenting next time. They did not build a business on Twitter. It's not even a business, and they were using Twitter for publicity, exactly as intended. Having a major arm of your project's publicity platform wiped out arbitrarily is still shitty, and still Twitter's fault.

Re: Twitter suspended our Open Data project's account and wiped all our followers

#70

Post by komali2 »

Rjevski wrote: post #2

I 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.

Hold on, I've reported multiple extraordinarily obvious spam rings before, with accounts as old as 2013, and I've even kicked up a stink here when Twitter employees show up, and I was told "bots don't violate the TOS."

I just checked, it's still there https://mobile.twitter.com/ksfAKBARI check followers/following for a massive ring of obvious spam.

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