As a conservative Twitter user sleeps, his account is hard at work | Hacker News Reader

As a conservative Twitter user sleeps, his account is hard at work

washingtonpost.com

34 pointsevo_932 comments

Why can't Twitter block this? It's really not much different than email spam. Twitter could pretty easily find duplicate posts and remove them.

More and more, I wonder why Twitter is so popular. I never really "got it". If I want news, I can go to a news website/aggregator. If I want memes, I can go to Reddit/Tumblr. If I want to talk to friends, I can use Facebook. Twitter always just gives me a headache.

> wonder why Twitter is so popular

Anecdotally, I've found several useful tidbits on twitter that are less than newsworthy (maybe because they are not interesting to a large subset of people) but that never popped up other places- I'm probably not using it correctly though.

From the article it sounds like a very large percent of their power users use tools like this. So if they banned it, many of their best users would quit.

Why should this be banned? It's not the same as spam, since you have to subscribe to someone to see their tweets.

Not a Twitter user but: if you wanted to disrupt or derail ongoing conversations, couldn't that be done programmatically too? Or harass people?

Yes, but that's a different subject entirely. This article is just describing someone queueing up general political tweets.

>and “.@realDonaldTrump” in hopes of getting the attention of Trump or those who track messages to him.

He mentions Trump by username in some tweets at least, so that could be considered "harassing" (depending on scale though).

These tweets leak into search results. Or, maybe you want to think of it as "Twitter allows them to leak into search results."

Not if they @ you, which is what these bots do--which also triggers a notification if you have them turned on.

I've found Twitter feeds more timely than status-light dashboards for various online services. Partly because the users start to scream before the SREs update their blinken lights.

I was vaguely interested in it (Twitter) when the Iranian purple revolution was going on, but that passed, and after that version of tweetdeck did as well, I've never been able to track topics well enough to make it more worth-while (to me) than a meme-tracker.

Other than that, I haven't found much use of it. I'm guessing that puts me in the dissenting position, but this isn't the first time that's happened.

Yeah, some online services are tardy as hell when it comes to updating their service status pages, a quick Twitter search is a great canary for any problems.

> I wonder why Twitter is so popular.

I don't have an account but it is very useful if I want to see is a program updated to a new version, how a politician feels about a recent event (or wants us to think they feel), or live updates to current events. All that may be possible with Facebook, but since I don't want to always be logged on, I have a huge pop up and annoying captcha

Everyone I know that enjoys twitter (I never got into it) uses it to interact with an extended group of people that they aren't friends with but have similar interests to -- including minor celebrities in their area.

There are limits already:

>Tweets: 2,400 per day. The daily update limit is further broken down into smaller limits for semi-hourly intervals. Retweets are counted as Tweets.

https://support.twitter.com/articles/15364

One tweet per 30 seconds is a 'limit'?

"If I want news, I can go to a news website/aggregator"

The one time I found twitter to be far superior is when I heard gunshots outside my apartment and found the location and a pretty good understanding of what happened within a few minutes.

As someone who barely uses Twitter, how did you find the information? I'm sure there is good info out there, but it's impossible to find unless you've already subscribed to follow people.

My community Facebook group does a fantastic job at answering the regular "gunshots vs. fireworks" debate.

Is this really a regular debate in the US? I've never heard a gunshot in my life in Germany.

Twitter apps on mobile devices can surface near-to-you Tweets. This is incredibly helpful in emergency situations.

A couple years back there were, literally, a dozen police cars on my street and traffic blocked in all directions. I discovered on Twitter searching Tweets near to me that a man had barricaded himself in an apartment around the corner. He had a hostage and when he started lighting the apartment on fire, the SF SWAT team killed him. [0]

More info on event from The SFist. [1]

[0] https://twitter.com/galactic/status/200451986838138880

[1] http://sfist.com/2012/05/09/homicide_suspect_has_standoff_wi...

EDIT: Link layout. Spelling. Reduce number of single-sentence paragraphs. Reword fourth sentence.

It was 2010, I don't quite remember how I did it, but it was super easy at the time. Had something to do with location searching. It was the "Buffalo City Grill Shooting". At the time I was a heavy twitter user and it was immediately obvious how I could query the app to figure out what just happened. Now I don't even have an account so I'm not sure it's still possible.

The automation in the conservative botnets on Twitter is kind of astounding. I had the misfortune of being replied to by one of the typical UltraMAGA2016 accounts on Twitter. A few replies, retweets, and favorites of that tweet showed up in my notifications. Then nothing for 5 days. Then on Sunday at 1am, a specific botnet picked it up and began retweeting and favoriting with a vengeance. A few every 20 to 70 seconds. This continued for a few hours and then stopped. Looking into the accounts, they all followed each other and retweeted and favorited things the other accounts posted. The vast majority were unused for any other purpose (no personal or work tweets of any kind, no retweets of anything outside this network and one adjacent). And over half of them were egg accounts with names similar to the account that initially replied (style of UltraTRUMPMaga, MAGATrump4Eva, etc).

>To reach beyond his own 78,900 followers, Sobieski adds a few more adornments, typing #MAGA to surface the tweet to the president’s supporters online and “.@realDonaldTrump” in hopes of getting the attention of Trump or those who track messages to him.

One of Trump's favorite tactics is to appropriate negative phrases like "fake news" to dilute its bite. Why don't his opponents borrow from his notebook and co-opt those hashtags to drown them out?

>One of Trump's favorite tactics is to appropriate negative phrases like "fake news" to dilute its bite When has he done that and it hasn't been fake news?

Do you think that fake news is just right wing news that is false or can false left wing news also be fake news? Hypocrites.

The parent comment makes no reference to right wing news, or even any judgment on the fakeness of left or right wing news.

Twitter used to be amazing. I found real friends who shared common affinities and got freelance work on a regular basis.

But now, twitter is full of political nonsense and bots. I had an "ultramarathoner" tweet "lier" at me the other day.

Honestly, HN is the closest thing to early-twitter that I know about for chatting about interesting stories.

To each his own ! I brutally prune the list of people I follow ; if I feel someone is spamming or retweeting garbage, I get rid of them. However, some people may not be so unforgiving and that is ok : they are probably the ones clicking on links in sponsored tweets.

I wish Twitter had better stats for that, I mean "this user's tweets are 5% of your timeline on average day" or something similar.

Most of this guy's followers are probably bots and other spammers.

The problem arises if/when this noise is weighted equally with humans when it comes to deciding what is "trending".

You raise an important point I had not considered. Bots could skew trending metrics to favor spammers. That could get them more media coverage which could lead to influencers trying to get in on the coverage by re-tweeting spam. And the spammer succeeds.

Unlike Google which mercilessly penalizes content farms, Twitter probably does not have the intellectual wherewithal to combat spammers.

Most modern media operations have been doing this for a long time. There are dead simple tools that do everything for you, like Buffer: https://buffer.com

Sounds like he's using tweetboss

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