Twitter suspended our Open Data project's account and wiped all our followers(openbenches.org)
openbenches.org
Twitter suspended our Open Data project's account and wiped all our followers
http://www.openbenches.org/blog/2018/05/twitter-suspended-our-account-and-wiped-all-our-followers/
153 comments
User adoption on Mastodon can be pretty big depending on the project. Look at the number of followers F-Droid has on Mastodon compared to Twitter.
https://mastodon.technology/@fdroidorg
https://twitter.com/fdroidorg
https://mastodon.technology/@fdroidorg
https://twitter.com/fdroidorg
I know of absolutely no people that use Mastadon. There might be a niche somewhere that uses it, but I can’t help to think that it would hurt rather than help any hobby project to choose Mastadon over Twitter.
I used Mastodon for a while, and it was a pretty good experience. I guess I just found it wasn't my crowd; every other person with something interesting to say turned out to be a "demi-girl otherkin fur-friend," or something like that, and while I am happy for people to have a place to do their thing — exercise your liberty, fur-friend! — I came to feel a bit out of place. It seems like its strong secondary focus on trigger warnings and safe spaces draws too narrow an audience to achieve wide adoption.
That depends heavily on the instance you choose. There's much, much less of that on the instance I'm (mainly) on.
And if they're saying interesting things, why do you care if they turn out to have a different lifestyle from yours?
Pick a different instance and try again.
And if they're saying interesting things, why do you care if they turn out to have a different lifestyle from yours?
Pick a different instance and try again.
There would probably be instances that I would fit into better, but discoverability is also a problem. I also had a hard time figuring out how to make multiple instances visible at once in a single interface, either on mobile or desktop; I'm not sure if that's even supposed to be possible.
As far as why I care, it's because these interesting people very understandably want to talk about their lifestyle choices, and I don't really want to hear about it. (Just like how I'm okay with people smoking in their homes, but I find their smoke distasteful.) It made the signal-to-noise ratio for me a little too low for pleasure.
As far as why I care, it's because these interesting people very understandably want to talk about their lifestyle choices, and I don't really want to hear about it. (Just like how I'm okay with people smoking in their homes, but I find their smoke distasteful.) It made the signal-to-noise ratio for me a little too low for pleasure.
I'm not sure about having simultaneous visibility of multiple instances, I just follow the people in whom I'm interested, and their toots turn up in my instance. That's part of how federation works. Discoverability is a problem, one that people are working on, but you can find people and follow them, and then others on that instance over there can be safely ignored.
And if there are people who say really interesting things mixed in with stuff you don't care about, that's a problem everywhere. There are a few things you can do. One is that you can use regex's to filter out stuff you're not interested in. Another is that you can choose to follow only people who don't talk about the other things, and trust that they will boost the things that you care about from others.
But it's a social medium, so there will be a mix. You can control it to some extent, but I've found the tools in Mastodon to be much more powerful than those in Twitter.
And if there are people who say really interesting things mixed in with stuff you don't care about, that's a problem everywhere. There are a few things you can do. One is that you can use regex's to filter out stuff you're not interested in. Another is that you can choose to follow only people who don't talk about the other things, and trust that they will boost the things that you care about from others.
But it's a social medium, so there will be a mix. You can control it to some extent, but I've found the tools in Mastodon to be much more powerful than those in Twitter.
But that defeats the whole point. Yeah it's nice that you can have your sub-communities but the value of Twitter such as it is is that it;s the universal default microblogging platform in the English-speaking world. Almost everyone who is important in society is accessible via Twitter, just the way that having an email address is a universal default.
When someone is telling you that their experience of a product or service sucks, and you tell them to use it differently, you're failing to understand them.
When someone is telling you that their experience of a product or service sucks, and you tell them to use it differently, you're failing to understand them.
I'm not telling people they're using it wrongly, I'm saying that Mastodon has benefits that they may not (yet) have realised, and that it's not Twitter. This is why I say that using both is a perfectly reasonable option.
And Mastodon is not Twitter. Twitter does have some advantages over Mastodon, and if that's what you want or need, then great.
But if you want a quality audience, Mastodon might be a reasonable alternative, and criticising it for not being the same as Twitter, or using the same metrics that you use for Twitter, is misguided.
I'm not good at analogies - never have been - but let me try one. If someone tells me that their experience of using my car sucks and I point out that it's a stick-shift and not an automatic, that's not my failure to understand them, that's me providing information to try to help them get the most out of an alternative experience.
Choosing an instance that matches your interests is part of the federated/non-centralised experience. It's different, and for some, like me, there is value in that difference.
And Mastodon is not Twitter. Twitter does have some advantages over Mastodon, and if that's what you want or need, then great.
But if you want a quality audience, Mastodon might be a reasonable alternative, and criticising it for not being the same as Twitter, or using the same metrics that you use for Twitter, is misguided.
I'm not good at analogies - never have been - but let me try one. If someone tells me that their experience of using my car sucks and I point out that it's a stick-shift and not an automatic, that's not my failure to understand them, that's me providing information to try to help them get the most out of an alternative experience.
Choosing an instance that matches your interests is part of the federated/non-centralised experience. It's different, and for some, like me, there is value in that difference.
The thing is, the OP has already explained that the value of Twitter to their project is the large number of people on that platform. It's great that you find Mastodon valuable, I do too - but it simply doesn't have enough users to generate the network effects required.
To build on your analogy, your distinction between stick shift and automatic in your car is not relevant to the person who needs a pickup truck to haul a large load. It misses the point of what the OP is trying to achieve in the first place.
To build on your analogy, your distinction between stick shift and automatic in your car is not relevant to the person who needs a pickup truck to haul a large load. It misses the point of what the OP is trying to achieve in the first place.
It does have enough users -- it just depends on which network you want to generate an effect. I'm able to have discussions on writing, on mathematics, on coding, on politics, and on society on Masto. It's not a ghost town.
Similar experience, but I suspect it depends rather on which local instance you join. Unfortunately, while this is some respects a strength (find a likeminded server, have fun) it also adds significant complexity to the UX.
Firstly, there's no reason to choose only one and not the other. Tweeting on Twitter and tooting on Mastodon can be done with a single command once you've set it up. I'd've thought that was a no brainer.
Secondly, I use Mastodon, and I'm on an instance with just over 1000 users. There are over 150K users on the main instance.
Secondly, I use Mastodon, and I'm on an instance with just over 1000 users. There are over 150K users on the main instance.
> Secondly, I use Mastodon, and I'm on an instance with just over 1000 users. There are over 150K users on the main instance.
For most people I know and follow, that's like, the low bar of twitter follower counts.
For most people I know and follow, that's like, the low bar of twitter follower counts.
While I acknowledge that numbers are numbers, to some extent, that's not really the point. If you find a Mastodon instance that has a community that's closely matched to your interests, suddenly that's 1K or 10K or 100K of high-quality followers.
And the smaller instances don't suffer the Twitter firehose problem. The instances I use, I watch all the toots, not just those of people I follow. So it's not the number of followers that matters, per se, it's the number of people who see what you say. On Twitter that will only be your followers, but on Mastodon it's pretty much everyone on the instance (for the smaller instances). More, you can be followed by, and have your toots seen by, people on other instances.
But my other point remains - there is no need to be exclusively on one or the other. It's comparatively trivial to put everything on both media.
If you can do that, and you care about your audience (quantity and quality), why wouldn't you?
And the smaller instances don't suffer the Twitter firehose problem. The instances I use, I watch all the toots, not just those of people I follow. So it's not the number of followers that matters, per se, it's the number of people who see what you say. On Twitter that will only be your followers, but on Mastodon it's pretty much everyone on the instance (for the smaller instances). More, you can be followed by, and have your toots seen by, people on other instances.
But my other point remains - there is no need to be exclusively on one or the other. It's comparatively trivial to put everything on both media.
If you can do that, and you care about your audience (quantity and quality), why wouldn't you?
> that's not really the point.
That's exactly the point though. If you put amount of people you are likely to reach above technical problems, then going solely to a service where the "high" follower count is 1/100th of the high follower counts on another is completely stupid.
> But my other point remains - there is no need to be exclusively on one or the other. It's comparatively trivial to put everything on both media.
Oh, I agree.
That's exactly the point though. If you put amount of people you are likely to reach above technical problems, then going solely to a service where the "high" follower count is 1/100th of the high follower counts on another is completely stupid.
> But my other point remains - there is no need to be exclusively on one or the other. It's comparatively trivial to put everything on both media.
Oh, I agree.
See: Price's Law. User count isn't everything.
Price's well-known square root law states that half of the literature on a subject will be contributed by the square root of the total number of authors publishing in that area....
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222619181_Price%27s...
Mastodon Monitoring Project
https://mnm.social https://dashboards.mnm.social
Also: http://sp3r4z.fr/mastodon/general
About 1.3 million users, 120m statuses (I believe that's cumulative).
Twitter: https://www.statisticbrain.com/twitter-statistics/
~700m users, ~340m active.
58m tweets/dy.
I'd compare sqrt of both. That's ~1,100 vs 26,000 top users.
Price's well-known square root law states that half of the literature on a subject will be contributed by the square root of the total number of authors publishing in that area....
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222619181_Price%27s...
Mastodon Monitoring Project
https://mnm.social https://dashboards.mnm.social
Also: http://sp3r4z.fr/mastodon/general
About 1.3 million users, 120m statuses (I believe that's cumulative).
Twitter: https://www.statisticbrain.com/twitter-statistics/
~700m users, ~340m active.
58m tweets/dy.
I'd compare sqrt of both. That's ~1,100 vs 26,000 top users.
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Fortunately it's not related to follower counts. You can follow people from other instances.
With or without bots?
You know of two now: me and Colin.
The twitter feed being a mirror also affects the numbers.
Following a mirror account is less interesting.
Just like how a mirror repo on GitHub is less interesting to star than a repo that has GitHub as its designated main location.
Following a mirror account is less interesting.
Just like how a mirror repo on GitHub is less interesting to star than a repo that has GitHub as its designated main location.
The F-Droid Twitter feed had existed for several years and was always tiny. It became a mirror instead once the Mastodon account got vastly more popular.
I imagine it also has to do with audience. F-Droid is a fairly technical project and more technical people may be fine with Mastodon... for a project that might not be oriented towards tech people I imagine it'd be more difficult to build a following there.
That's what I said, it depends on the project. An open data project has a good chance of finding an audience on Masto, I think.
I want to want to participate on Mastodon. But I feel like it's a bunch of little walled gardens and I feel like that's a barrier to entry for me. It's a bug, not a feature.
I also can't figure out where to start. I don't feel that way about Twitter.
I also can't figure out where to start. I don't feel that way about Twitter.
You seem to like writing. So try this instance,
https://mastodon.theubergroup.org
There is one writer there I follow and whose posts I enjoy:
https://mastodon.theubergroup.org/@eleanor
Look at who she's following to get an idea of other people you might consider interesting.
Also look at the #GetOnOurLawn hashtag. You have to be logged in to an instance to search for it.
EDIT: My mistake, it is possible to view hashtags without logging in. Here it is from wandering.shop, an instance larger than the one I suggested above:
https://wandering.shop/tags/getonourlawn
https://mastodon.theubergroup.org
There is one writer there I follow and whose posts I enjoy:
https://mastodon.theubergroup.org/@eleanor
Look at who she's following to get an idea of other people you might consider interesting.
Also look at the #GetOnOurLawn hashtag. You have to be logged in to an instance to search for it.
EDIT: My mistake, it is possible to view hashtags without logging in. Here it is from wandering.shop, an instance larger than the one I suggested above:
https://wandering.shop/tags/getonourlawn
Thank you. I will give it a look.
I recently set up a couple of Mastodon instances - one for an interest group, and one for my family. The latter is effectively dead, but the former is slowly gaining users.
The biggest problem I've found is content discover. Mastodon works well for new users if the instance you're on has others who follow users that interest you - otherwise, silence. There is no way that I've found to search the entire multiverse, and no easy way to bootstrap an instance by connecting to other instances or other instances' users en masse.
The biggest problem I've found is content discover. Mastodon works well for new users if the instance you're on has others who follow users that interest you - otherwise, silence. There is no way that I've found to search the entire multiverse, and no easy way to bootstrap an instance by connecting to other instances or other instances' users en masse.
The gardens are interconnected, for the most part. That's the point.
And you can either join one or run your own.
And you can either join one or run your own.
And if I wanted to message you personally with questions about it for an indefinite period of some weeks or months while I get oriented, are you okay with that?
"Here, Doreen, here's my email address and my phone number. Don't hesitate to contact me. Happy to explain like you are my clueless little sister until you feel comfortable."
"Here, Doreen, here's my email address and my phone number. Don't hesitate to contact me. Happy to explain like you are my clueless little sister until you feel comfortable."
I'd do what I generally do with reasonable questions: point the questioner at a FAQ and suggest they simply dive in and try it.
https://github.com/tootsuite/documentation/blob/master/Using...
https://github.com/tootsuite/documentation/blob/master/Using...
This isn't rocket surgery. Or solving the homeless & mental health crises.
Sign up at https://Mastodon.social (big main Engish-mostly instance), or I can vouch for https://toot.cat (run by a friend, Woozle). I'm @dredmorbius at multiple instances, though I mostly monitor mastodon.cloud (which has been increasingly flaky).
https://github.com/tootsuite/documentation/blob/master/Using...
https://github.com/tootsuite/documentation/blob/master/Using...
This isn't rocket surgery. Or solving the homeless & mental health crises.
Sign up at https://Mastodon.social (big main Engish-mostly instance), or I can vouch for https://toot.cat (run by a friend, Woozle). I'm @dredmorbius at multiple instances, though I mostly monitor mastodon.cloud (which has been increasingly flaky).
If you can figure out Twitter, you can definitely figure out Mastodon. They have similar levels of complexity — you're just not familiar with Mastodon's quirks yet. If you don't want to put in the effort, though, that's fine.
So the answer is no, you don't want to talk to me. I can figure it out myself. (I realize you aren't the GP, but you did choose to reply.)
I think you are thinking of Mastodon primarily as a technical platform. I am thinking of it primarily as a social environment.
When I was active on Metafilter, there was a new social platform all the members were talking about. It was invitation only. I was homeless at the time and I was generally treated pretty badly by most members there. Nonetheless, someone gave me an invitation and I joined. And it was pointless because what few people I did recognize were people with a track record of treating me terribly.
If people have little walled gardens, but are hesitant for any reason to admit me to their inner circle, then there's no there there for me.
Sure, I can figure out the technical details, if I have reason to. But I don't have sufficient connection to have reason to. Walled gardens serve an inner circle of people. I don't belong to any inner circle that are using Mastodon.
Perhaps that will change. But it won't likely change by joining Mastodon. It might change by somehow becoming an insider somewhere with a group that already uses and prefers the platform.
I think you are thinking of Mastodon primarily as a technical platform. I am thinking of it primarily as a social environment.
When I was active on Metafilter, there was a new social platform all the members were talking about. It was invitation only. I was homeless at the time and I was generally treated pretty badly by most members there. Nonetheless, someone gave me an invitation and I joined. And it was pointless because what few people I did recognize were people with a track record of treating me terribly.
If people have little walled gardens, but are hesitant for any reason to admit me to their inner circle, then there's no there there for me.
Sure, I can figure out the technical details, if I have reason to. But I don't have sufficient connection to have reason to. Walled gardens serve an inner circle of people. I don't belong to any inner circle that are using Mastodon.
Perhaps that will change. But it won't likely change by joining Mastodon. It might change by somehow becoming an insider somewhere with a group that already uses and prefers the platform.
I'll do that. Message me @[email protected] and I'll be happy to help. Otherwise, feel free to email me: [email protected].
For now, I strongly recommend that you establish an account at mastodon.social. It's the instance with the most users and therefore has the most local content to follow and the widest possible reach.
For now, I strongly recommend that you establish an account at mastodon.social. It's the instance with the most users and therefore has the most local content to follow and the widest possible reach.
Thank you.
I'm just happy to see there's an expectation that Mastodon will be acknowledged in a post like this. That's progress!
What I'm wondering is does Mastodon and the like fit with Europe's GDPR?
A similar thing happened to a much bigger, also innocent, account recently:
https://kotaku.com/nintendo-fan-account-flagged-on-twitter-f...
I can almost buy the need to have automated account suspensions, but shouldn’t the appeal at least be human reviewed? When your appeal logic is:
if (true) {
deny_appeal();
}
Twitters bot detection "algorithm" is:
For 1 to accounts do ban account()
A bot will not appeal the ban, while human will appeal!
For 1 to accounts do ban account()
A bot will not appeal the ban, while human will appeal!
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...
I don't think they store all their data on twitter. If they did, they probably wouldn't have this file in their repo: https://github.com/edent/openbenches/blob/master/database/da...
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.
All the data is on openbenches.org and GitHub.
[deleted]
I run a bot swarm that tweets transit delays in Boston and this has been affecting some of the most prolific accounts (i.e. the one that tweets bus delays), that being said, it's been super easy to get them reactivated and I havn't lost any followers.
Always figured that you get what you pay for, but in fact, Twitter/Facebook/Google aren't nearly that reliable in the long term.
A remarkably poor hueristic.
Though you should carefully examine just that.
Though you should carefully examine just that.
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...
[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.
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
That's possible. We get the text from Google's OCR product - and a lot of benches are in all caps.
We could try to shift it all to sentence case, but that might lose the meaning of proper nouns.
Thanks for the suggestion though, that's the first thing which has made sense about the banning.
We could try to shift it all to sentence case, but that might lose the meaning of proper nouns.
Thanks for the suggestion though, that's the first thing which has made sense about the banning.
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.
> 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.
My guess would be the source of posts. Looks like they post from "Twitter for Google TV" and "edent's tweeting robot", so they're probably outliers due to the volume of posts and where the posts are coming from. That combined with the characteristics of the text probably triggered the algorithm. That being said, it's unfortunate that this happened to them, the lack of manual review when kinds of things go wrong is shocking.
"Twitter for Google TV" suggests that they may be using a Twitter API key that wasn't issued to them. Probably not a good idea...
We don't get anywhere near that. On a good day we might get 100.
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.
Our data is fine. All cloud hosted and available on GitHub.
What we've lost is our social graph. That's not something which can easily be decentralised.
What we've lost is our social graph. That's not something which can easily be decentralised.
What's a good alternative you would suggest?
I often have a similar problem and the fact is that most users hang out on platforms that suck like Twitter, Facebook, etc.
If I build my business on a decentralized platform like blockchain etc. I immediately lose 90% or even more of my target audience.
If I build my business on my own datacenter the cost and maintenance involved is staggeringly high.
Do you have a reasonable alternative that would allow small players like us to host large volumes of data (say about 1 TB to 2 TB) while completely controlling the ownership of the data?
I often have a similar problem and the fact is that most users hang out on platforms that suck like Twitter, Facebook, etc.
If I build my business on a decentralized platform like blockchain etc. I immediately lose 90% or even more of my target audience.
If I build my business on my own datacenter the cost and maintenance involved is staggeringly high.
Do you have a reasonable alternative that would allow small players like us to host large volumes of data (say about 1 TB to 2 TB) while completely controlling the ownership of the data?
They had, in their own words hundreds of followers.
At the time of this comment, the fediverse has about 1.2 million accounts. It's not that hard to get hundreds of followers there.
At the time of this comment, the fediverse has about 1.2 million accounts. It's not that hard to get hundreds of followers there.
Twitter has hundreds of times more accounts. It depends on the audience, everyone's mileage may vary, so on and so forth, but as a general rule of thumb, if you're drawing from a pool that's 300x bigger, it's going to be easier to get orders of magnitude more followers. This is not Mastodon's fault; network effects are what they are.
Having said that, anecdotally I find it very hard to get people outside of a relatively narrow demographic to get on board with it. More than one fairly technically literate friend of mine has stopped about at the point where they're confronted with the choice of what instance to create an account on, especially if they choose and then get told "no, that instance is full, go create one somewhere else." It's not clear that the instance, at least theoretically, doesn't matter.
Note I say "theoretically," because it turns out it can matter. If the instance you choose is maintained poorly, your experience may be worse. (This is in fact my experience.) And it's not clear how to migrate between instances while keeping your social graph intact. Mastodon has a long way to go in terms of user experience to be accessible to people who aren't dedicated enough to the idea of a decentralized Twitter alternative to put up with this stuff.
Last but not least: it's hard for me not to notice that in the year or so I've had a Mastodon account, it's been very hard for me to discover people to follow, especially after the occasional burst of new users dies down. The people I followed are, except for two or three folks who are clearly dedicated to it over Twitter for philosophical reasons, mostly...just not using it now. (Of the two dozen people I followed, my timeline is now pretty much just content from two users, one of who is only "there" because his blog crossposts automatically.) You know where most of them are still active? Twitter.
tl;dr: it might be great for a project like OpenBench to also be on Mastodon, but not exclusively be on it.
Having said that, anecdotally I find it very hard to get people outside of a relatively narrow demographic to get on board with it. More than one fairly technically literate friend of mine has stopped about at the point where they're confronted with the choice of what instance to create an account on, especially if they choose and then get told "no, that instance is full, go create one somewhere else." It's not clear that the instance, at least theoretically, doesn't matter.
Note I say "theoretically," because it turns out it can matter. If the instance you choose is maintained poorly, your experience may be worse. (This is in fact my experience.) And it's not clear how to migrate between instances while keeping your social graph intact. Mastodon has a long way to go in terms of user experience to be accessible to people who aren't dedicated enough to the idea of a decentralized Twitter alternative to put up with this stuff.
Last but not least: it's hard for me not to notice that in the year or so I've had a Mastodon account, it's been very hard for me to discover people to follow, especially after the occasional burst of new users dies down. The people I followed are, except for two or three folks who are clearly dedicated to it over Twitter for philosophical reasons, mostly...just not using it now. (Of the two dozen people I followed, my timeline is now pretty much just content from two users, one of who is only "there" because his blog crossposts automatically.) You know where most of them are still active? Twitter.
tl;dr: it might be great for a project like OpenBench to also be on Mastodon, but not exclusively be on it.
So to break things down as I think we're partially of the same view:
1. To start with the end, nobody's suggesting they're exclusively on Mastodon (which is not the only Fediverse tool, there are others), and they absolutely should syndicate far and wide. However, posting to Mastodon/Pleroma/Whatever first and syndicating the content elsewhere means that if this happens again, they don't lose tweets.
2. Drawing from a pool 300x bigger doesn't make for 300x better interactions. Generally Fediverse SNR seems to be better, but this is more or less so depending upon interest and representation. Bear in mind OP's twitter account had followers in the hundreds, like my Mastodon account does. I have thousands on twitter, but I only interact with maybe 50-100 people there.
3. WRT your friend, there's now https://joinmastodon.org/, which will guide them to an instance. Your friend is not required to use Mastodon to participate in the Fediverse. There are other tools out there. They're all linked (you can use Pleroma and read Mastodon toots for example). The whole point of the fediverse is that it isn't a walled garden and that you own your content.
4. There are tools to assist with migrating Mastodon accounts but they're early stage. I agree this sucks, but in it's defence it's because Mastodon is new and expanding and the tools are improving.
5. This was the bit I wanted to talk about:
> it's been very hard for me to discover people to follow
Yup. I completely agree. The solution however is right under your nose. The way to find people to follow in the Fediverse is:
1. Search for hashtags you're interested in.
2. Find people using those hashtags and check out their feeds.
3. Look at who they follow and check those people out.
This is how every social network pretty much used to work, and fundamentally is down to the fact that in the fediverse you own your presence, your data and your network which means you are responsible for it. There's nobody pushing for engagement, nobody making money from filling your feed with ads. The price is personal responsibility.
If you think that's too high a price to pay, that's fine. Stay in the walled garden with curated content and risk having all the content you produced for corporations for free so they could sell ads to be pushed to you and your friends erased at the drop of a hat without explanation.
And you can say it'll never work, it'll never replace twitter or facebook. But HN will never replace Reddit and Lobsters will never replace HN, yet both are doing pretty well for the communities they serve. Once you bend your head around the concept that fediverse communities as a whole have no interest in replicating Twitter or Facebook it starts to make a lot more sense.
1. To start with the end, nobody's suggesting they're exclusively on Mastodon (which is not the only Fediverse tool, there are others), and they absolutely should syndicate far and wide. However, posting to Mastodon/Pleroma/Whatever first and syndicating the content elsewhere means that if this happens again, they don't lose tweets.
2. Drawing from a pool 300x bigger doesn't make for 300x better interactions. Generally Fediverse SNR seems to be better, but this is more or less so depending upon interest and representation. Bear in mind OP's twitter account had followers in the hundreds, like my Mastodon account does. I have thousands on twitter, but I only interact with maybe 50-100 people there.
3. WRT your friend, there's now https://joinmastodon.org/, which will guide them to an instance. Your friend is not required to use Mastodon to participate in the Fediverse. There are other tools out there. They're all linked (you can use Pleroma and read Mastodon toots for example). The whole point of the fediverse is that it isn't a walled garden and that you own your content.
4. There are tools to assist with migrating Mastodon accounts but they're early stage. I agree this sucks, but in it's defence it's because Mastodon is new and expanding and the tools are improving.
5. This was the bit I wanted to talk about:
> it's been very hard for me to discover people to follow
Yup. I completely agree. The solution however is right under your nose. The way to find people to follow in the Fediverse is:
1. Search for hashtags you're interested in.
2. Find people using those hashtags and check out their feeds.
3. Look at who they follow and check those people out.
This is how every social network pretty much used to work, and fundamentally is down to the fact that in the fediverse you own your presence, your data and your network which means you are responsible for it. There's nobody pushing for engagement, nobody making money from filling your feed with ads. The price is personal responsibility.
If you think that's too high a price to pay, that's fine. Stay in the walled garden with curated content and risk having all the content you produced for corporations for free so they could sell ads to be pushed to you and your friends erased at the drop of a hat without explanation.
And you can say it'll never work, it'll never replace twitter or facebook. But HN will never replace Reddit and Lobsters will never replace HN, yet both are doing pretty well for the communities they serve. Once you bend your head around the concept that fediverse communities as a whole have no interest in replicating Twitter or Facebook it starts to make a lot more sense.
We may not be on the same page, but we're probably at least on adjacent pages. :)
I should be clear that I like Mastodon despite all my complaints -- it's just that I often feel as if I like it more in theory than practice. I've had better luck with Micro.blog, which is a different approach to the same problem (i.e., own your own content), built on top of webmentions and syndication feeds. But I'm not sure it's really a better approach, just different.
I should be clear that I like Mastodon despite all my complaints -- it's just that I often feel as if I like it more in theory than practice. I've had better luck with Micro.blog, which is a different approach to the same problem (i.e., own your own content), built on top of webmentions and syndication feeds. But I'm not sure it's really a better approach, just different.
Oooh Micro.blog looks interesting. Is it open source?
I don't think the timeline bits are, although I think it's under consideration. (Sorry for being extremely fuzzy there.) I know you don't actually have to pay for hosting with them, which I don't think they do a great job of communicating yet -- a hosted Micro.blog is actually just Jekyll with a web front end, and there are people using their own Jekyll setups, or WordPress, or a few other solutions. (I'm pretty sure the timeline is actually built on top of JSON Feed and webmentions.)
Use cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure. Or pay to be colocated in a datacenter -- you don't need to build one. Back up your databases somewhere that only you control.
You'll have to hire some engineers to maintain this, but it won't be as bad as building a datacenter. And it's what you'll need to do to avoid being a sharecropper on someone else's platform.
You'll have to hire some engineers to maintain this, but it won't be as bad as building a datacenter. And it's what you'll need to do to avoid being a sharecropper on someone else's platform.
> You'll have to hire some engineers to maintain this
That rules out small projects and requires monetization.
That rules out small projects and requires monetization.
I wonder how many companies have had their firehose dry up but then just generated data to get a bit of extra cash before closing down. Seems like you could train an AI model to do that if you have enough historical data saved.
Unrelated: Openbenches, you don't have a single picture of the greatest benches in America? http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/...
I think you are confusing it with this bench https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/jamacia-pond-bench
Haha! If you can take a photo and upload it, we'll gladly put it on the map.
Same thing happened with my @busplungebot . All it did was post articles where about about buses plunging off cliffs have occurred. Hell, I think I was the only follower.
I haven’t even bothered to log in and fix it.
I haven’t even bothered to log in and fix it.
Despite the promises, the followers never returned.
We only had a few hundred, not bad for a parochial project on the psychogeography of memorials, but now we had zero.
They currently have 396, including me.
We only had a few hundred, not bad for a parochial project on the psychogeography of memorials, but now we had zero.
They currently have 396, including me.
Maybe you were looking at the following, not the followers. I see 222 followers.
No. It's up to 427 currently:
OpenBenches.org @openbenches Made with in Oxford by @edent and @summerbeth openbenches.org 393 Following 427 Followers
OpenBenches.org @openbenches Made with in Oxford by @edent and @summerbeth openbenches.org 393 Following 427 Followers
Very strange, I now see 396 following and 257 followers. Social blade confirms the follower number too. I wonder if there's some Twitter caching going on.
No clue, though the count I currently see is 458, fwiw.
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.
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.
I just checked, it's still there https://mobile.twitter.com/ksfAKBARI check followers/following for a massive ring of obvious spam.
Could everyone who has a Twitter account report some of those? Just to see if a pile of reports from mostly influential accounts (we’re on HN after all) would have any effect.
Here’s a screenshot of the account just in case this actually works: https://i.imgur.com/xNviClq.png
Here’s a screenshot of the account just in case this actually works: https://i.imgur.com/xNviClq.png
It took a lot of effort to get twitter to do something about the crypto spam accounts targeting elon musk. SO obvious yet none of their systems seemed to catch it.
I read a few of the tweets and it's all gibberish. What is the purpose of such a bot? Is the purpose being accomplished?
To inflate some other account's (either spam bot, or someone who buys fake followers) followers and make them look legitimate.
However this particular account is a spam bot as it occasionally tweets financial frauds such as "yes loans any good (link: yes-loans-any-good.txtloanltd.com) yes-loans-any-good.txtloanltd.com #no fax online loans".
However this particular account is a spam bot as it occasionally tweets financial frauds such as "yes loans any good (link: yes-loans-any-good.txtloanltd.com) yes-loans-any-good.txtloanltd.com #no fax online loans".
> I’m wondering what the idiots at Twitter are really doing.
What if they're not idiots? What if that system is working exactly as intended?
What if they're not idiots? What if that system is working exactly as intended?
This is a good point. Maybe Twitter finds that these changes are driving away people who don't monetize as much and appealing to the people who do. Much like Fox News found that scummy "buy gold now!" / "sell your gold now!" ads worked well for their audience, maybe this is what engages people.
I mean, it works for spam. Obvious bad english, poor spelling and punctuation, etc. weed out people who know this is an obvious scam, leaving only the type of people who will overlook every red flag imaginable because their gullibility and greed overwhelms them.
I mean, it works for spam. Obvious bad english, poor spelling and punctuation, etc. weed out people who know this is an obvious scam, leaving only the type of people who will overlook every red flag imaginable because their gullibility and greed overwhelms them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
AI bugs are the new plausible deniability. You think this is a mess now? Wait till we get robotic AI weapons everywhere.
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.
Is spam a problem for Twitter users?
It is bots and the algorithmic timeline (which Twitter spam with lots of people i don't follow) that ruined it for me. The bot issue seems simpler to solve than spam, (a Turing test?) and I can only think that Twitter feel the bots will one day make them profitable.
It is bots and the algorithmic timeline (which Twitter spam with lots of people i don't follow) that ruined it for me. The bot issue seems simpler to solve than spam, (a Turing test?) and I can only think that Twitter feel the bots will one day make them profitable.
re: "idiots at Twitter" - It's always nice to encounter someone smart on internet.
I once wanted to have a Twitter account without a phone number attached to it.
It got banned within 5 minutes of being created, I didn't use Tor, proxy or anything shady, a normal Chrome browser and a normal gmail account. All I did was Tweet once (their own localized hell world tweet where I didn't even fill in the text).
Reason was something that amounted to breaking their ToS via 'automated use' or some shit. Of course if I were to provide my mobile number it'd get instantly unlocked, 0 human oversight on that too.
Opening a support ticket sent me their automated crap email saying the same thing and asking for phone number again to instantly get my 10 minutes old account unlocked.
I never heard from a human.
They reap what they sow.
Edit: and by 'without a phone number' I mean I didn't fill it in when creating the account (I don't even remember if it asked there but I somehow got an account open without one), just out of principle of not wanting to give any more information than I need to any service I use. And of course I didn't divulge it after that borderline ransomware situation and my opinion of Twitter has dropped (generously speaking..). It was also my only ever attempt at having a Twitter account, not a secondary account or something like that. I also have a static Polish IP for years now, no other service ever 'caught' me for being a bot, it was in an up to date Chrome on Windows 10, etc.
It got banned within 5 minutes of being created, I didn't use Tor, proxy or anything shady, a normal Chrome browser and a normal gmail account. All I did was Tweet once (their own localized hell world tweet where I didn't even fill in the text).
Reason was something that amounted to breaking their ToS via 'automated use' or some shit. Of course if I were to provide my mobile number it'd get instantly unlocked, 0 human oversight on that too.
Opening a support ticket sent me their automated crap email saying the same thing and asking for phone number again to instantly get my 10 minutes old account unlocked.
I never heard from a human.
They reap what they sow.
Edit: and by 'without a phone number' I mean I didn't fill it in when creating the account (I don't even remember if it asked there but I somehow got an account open without one), just out of principle of not wanting to give any more information than I need to any service I use. And of course I didn't divulge it after that borderline ransomware situation and my opinion of Twitter has dropped (generously speaking..). It was also my only ever attempt at having a Twitter account, not a secondary account or something like that. I also have a static Polish IP for years now, no other service ever 'caught' me for being a bot, it was in an up to date Chrome on Windows 10, etc.
I assume this is sarcasm, so I’d like to point out that I don’t consider myself smarter than anyone else or anything - I say idiots simply because there’s no excuse where blatantly obvious spam (for example the crypto currency scam replies in response to famous accounts like Elon Musk) isn’t deleted automatically.
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
> 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.
That's trivial to abuse, given a group of accounts filing false reports.
That's not a hypothetical; as an example, Facebook's reporting functionality has been abused to attack people's accounts as part of various hate campaigns.
That's trivial to abuse, given a group of accounts filing false reports.
That's not a hypothetical; as an example, Facebook's reporting functionality has been abused to attack people's accounts as part of various hate campaigns.
If you’re relying on reports that can be gamed.
> Automated systems can and will be gamed as well.
Taking an user’s reputation, account lifetime, reputation of their followers, etc (so for example, a report from a new account has less weight than an established account with a good history) will sort that out.
And when everything else fails, a proper appeals system where you talk to humans will solve this problem once and for all. False positives and abuse are bound to happen eventually, but they’re tolerable as long as you have a proper appeals process to deal with them.
Taking an user’s reputation, account lifetime, reputation of their followers, etc (so for example, a report from a new account has less weight than an established account with a good history) will sort that out.
And when everything else fails, a proper appeals system where you talk to humans will solve this problem once and for all. False positives and abuse are bound to happen eventually, but they’re tolerable as long as you have a proper appeals process to deal with them.
Automatically flag any account making a reply with the same name or same picture. It's incredibly simple yet they don't do it.
I’m sure their engineers (if they still have any - I haven’t seen any innovation from Twitter in a long time) are more than capable of fixing this if management lets them.
Hiring more engineers isn’t going to solve it. Management and product is where the real problem is IMO.
Hiring more engineers isn’t going to solve it. Management and product is where the real problem is IMO.
To be fair, if the only thing they're geniuses as is making a money pit look attractive to investors.
It all makes sense when you realize that they're lying and their "automated system" is a bunch of low level contractors.
Artificial artificial intelligence, if you will
<Charlton Heston Voice> "Automated system" is made of people!
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 you need to keep the business running, for example, software engineering, software support, hardware engineering, hardware support, network engineering, software engineering, HR, finance, legal, PR, management, IT department, etc.
A company of this scale is not just code and raw technical skills. There are many nuances that you need to appreciate before you understand why it involves 1k-5k employees.
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 you need to keep the business running, for example, software engineering, software support, hardware engineering, hardware support, network engineering, software engineering, HR, finance, legal, PR, management, IT department, etc.
A company of this scale is not just code and raw technical skills. There are many nuances that you need to appreciate before you understand why it involves 1k-5k employees.
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.
Typically it doesn't happen because it's more profitable to use data scientists to sell more ads.
Before being acquired by Facebook, WhatsApp was supporting 900 million users with only 50 employees. So it can be done if you know what you're doing, run a robust tech stack, and don't worry about customer service (and to be clear, Twitter doesn't do customer service, either).
Just last month Krebs got told by Facebook report system carding is welcome content on Facebook: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/04/is-facebooks-anti-abuse-...
I've reported someone leaking Polish court documents of an ongoing case on Facebook - nothing happened.
I've reported a YouTube video praising Anders Breivik as an European hero defending whites from Marxists, Leftists and Muslims - it's still up.
I've created a Twitter account and it got instantly locked for being 'suspicious' or 'automated' (but of course giving them my phone number would fix it instantly) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014511
What are the nuances that I'm missing?
I've reported someone leaking Polish court documents of an ongoing case on Facebook - nothing happened.
I've reported a YouTube video praising Anders Breivik as an European hero defending whites from Marxists, Leftists and Muslims - it's still up.
I've created a Twitter account and it got instantly locked for being 'suspicious' or 'automated' (but of course giving them my phone number would fix it instantly) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014511
What are the nuances that I'm missing?
Your attitude on this entire thread has been incredibly condescending. Why don't you try and think of why these problems are hard instead of just assuming they are all easy, as you've done so far?
I challenge you try and think through why your simple spam filter and human appeals process will not scale to Twitter's size. What kind of throughput can it handle? What happens when there is more content being appealed than the review team can handle? How do you prevent attackers from maliciously flagging other users' content? How do you handle advanced threats where attackers compromise existing accounts then begin to spam, thus bypassing any "easy" checks like looking at account age? How do you classify "hateful" speech? How does it scale to foreign languages, slang, etc?
I challenge you try and think through why your simple spam filter and human appeals process will not scale to Twitter's size. What kind of throughput can it handle? What happens when there is more content being appealed than the review team can handle? How do you prevent attackers from maliciously flagging other users' content? How do you handle advanced threats where attackers compromise existing accounts then begin to spam, thus bypassing any "easy" checks like looking at account age? How do you classify "hateful" speech? How does it scale to foreign languages, slang, etc?
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)
> 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.
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.
Any of the open-source email spam filters? Not saying they’re excellent by any means but they’d at least take care of the most obvious spam there is. False positives can be dealt with appeals - allow people to actually appeal the decision and get a human to review it. I’d take the occasional false positive with a proper appeals system any day over the current cesspool that is Twitter.
Like what? SpamAssassin? You would be surprised how much obvious spam gets through it in the face of the kind of spam onslaught that goes on in the real world today.
Seriously, this problem is not as easy to solve for machines as you think it is.
Seriously, this problem is not as easy to solve for machines as you think it is.
Well, they're Twitter. How does Google filter all my Gmail spam? So far I've had one or two emails go through in all these years and my account is available in several leaks, receiving tens of spam mails a day.
And email seems like a harder place to police, being decentralized. These guys control the gateway to the service!
And email seems like a harder place to police, being decentralized. These guys control the gateway to the service!
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 trusting some automated 'spam detection algo' and making actionable, irrecoverable decisions on fuzzy math is completely idiotic, boneheaded, and fucking stupid! If you're in that product team, you deserve every shred of scorn you're getting.
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 trusting some automated 'spam detection algo' and making actionable, irrecoverable decisions on fuzzy math is completely idiotic, boneheaded, and fucking stupid! If you're in that product team, you deserve every shred of scorn you're getting.
> 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).
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).
If I was looking for a sneaky way to get huge number of followers, this kind of sob story might be the way to do it. ;)
Seems like Twitter's 'automated systems' are to incrementally ban every account, for unspecified reasons, then re-instate those who figure out how to object.
(Of course, if this were a conscious strategy, they'd probably be better about not destroying following/follower state through a cycle.)
(Of course, if this were a conscious strategy, they'd probably be better about not destroying following/follower state through a cycle.)
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.
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.
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.
What was actually lost? Aren't followers just a number? Did they interact with you in any meaningful way? Did they contribute to the project?
My experience is that even thousands of Twitter followers amount to no real contribution to anything.
Anybody here with a different experience?
My experience is that even thousands of Twitter followers amount to no real contribution to anything.
Anybody here with a different experience?
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 like this one that don't have some kind of new angle or widespread interest, but thought I'd see how others are feeling about it first.
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 like this one that don't have some kind of new angle or widespread interest, but thought I'd see how others are feeling about it first.
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 sorts of issues that come up in our society and seem to affect all of us are in our noblest interests to take concern with.
I say we let these articles live.
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 sorts of issues that come up in our society and seem to affect all of us are in our noblest interests to take concern with.
I say we let these articles live.
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.
But, okay. It looks like the general opinion is that it would be inappropriate to flag them.
I can see where you’re coming from. Repetitive formulaic content can definitely contribute a lot of noise on sites like this.
But, I think these articles are not the result of formula or even a superficial trend. I can’t imagine what the motive would be. Until further notice, these articles seem to mostly be coming from a place of genuine concern.
What if the reason we keep seeing the posts is that the problem is simply that significant?
Speaking from a more personal perspective, I am surprised that the problem continues like it does. It seems like the exact sort of societies are built to prevent. It can ruin livelihoods, can happen to anyone, at any time, the causes are blackboxed, and there is almost always no recourse.
But, I think these articles are not the result of formula or even a superficial trend. I can’t imagine what the motive would be. Until further notice, these articles seem to mostly be coming from a place of genuine concern.
What if the reason we keep seeing the posts is that the problem is simply that significant?
Speaking from a more personal perspective, I am surprised that the problem continues like it does. It seems like the exact sort of societies are built to prevent. It can ruin livelihoods, can happen to anyone, at any time, the causes are blackboxed, and there is almost always no recourse.
While repetitive, these stories serve as a useful reminder that Twitter management is still just as incompetent as ever, and no one should rely on their service for anything important.
Right these stories are "repetitive" because these companies continue to be shitty at what they do. That fact itself is something everyone reading this site should be keeping abreast of.
I would agree with you and I usually feel the same way, however this particular instance makes sense as in fact his users never returned and hes appealing to those people to let them know. If I was following him, I doubt I would even notice the benches go missing from my feed.
Now as for its interest to HN...I thought it was an interesting thing they are doing and I'm glad that I know it exists now.
Now as for its interest to HN...I thought it was an interesting thing they are doing and I'm glad that I know it exists now.
I posted it here for a few reasons. One of which that someone from Twitter might see it and fix it.
The other is to remind all the startups which frequent this site that their actions have consequences.
The other is to remind all the startups which frequent this site that their actions have consequences.
I find this interesting because it helps me to better understand how to get support/results from one of the many popular systems that offer very little.
>Yes, I know. We should redecentralize and put our content on Mastodon, or the BlockChain, or some other convoluted platform which has no users. But that’s just not practical for a small project. We have limited technical resources and have to go to where the people are.
Despite there being better technical options, those options can't be considered just on their technical merits... User adoption is also crucial.