> because focusing on the ethical behavior of members of the public is generally useless. If the people commenting here didn't do it, someone else would. That doesn't excuse them, but it does mean going after them isn't an effective strategy.
But... we're talking to the people that did. It is no hypothetical, no question. Past tense. Done. Did.
I'm not expecting this to axiomatically solve all twitter abuse. I do hope it will spark a conversation about how absolutely ruthlessly amoral many people here are. I hope young people looking for funding for a startup will think twice when they see what kind of environment HN creates. Do you really want to plant your flag and take money from people who enable fraudsters from the very ecosystem you plan to engage with?
I point out people like that all the time in many venues. Because I think that raising awareness of the utter amorality of the software industry means more amoral assholes will be penalized for their actions. Perhaps this is naïve, but it is a conceit I will not easily give up.
> Besides setting a bad precedent for HN,
Yeah the bad precedent of, "Don't boast about how you're destroying the ecosystem we're trying to build a living on." We wouldn't want to disenfranchise the wretched thieving toe-rags who think making political twitterbomb networks, now would we?
> Twitter already has access to much more information than the BBC did when they did their investigation. Twitter simply doesn't care to act on it. If it was a priority for Twitter, they would fix it, certainly not by bringing a lawsuit, but by applying a technical solution across the board.
It's curious how the instant I mention sending data to twitter for enforcement suddenly that, too, is useless. We should focus on making twitter do something but since they don't care we shouldn't bother. Lower our arms from supplication and sink into the mud, I suppose?
> By blaming the bad actors, you take heat off of Twitter,
No see, I have enough incandescent bile that I can do both. But you seem to want to do neither.