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Fun story: I once wrote a primitive Twitter bot as an experiment, and forgot about it. It's been running on a Raspberry Pi unattended for a few years now, tweeting random stuff and periodically "engaging" with a predefined set of topics.

It has a Klout score. It has more followers than me.

[edit: spelling]

Do me a favor and check up on it once in a while.

If it becomes self-aware, we may have a problem.

I've seen this movie before somewhere...

I need to make a kill switch of some kind.

I wonder how many are other bots? Also, Klout still exists?

Millions.

Klout still exists, apparently. I don't see many people referencing it anymore though.

Bots can be useful. Good bots (ones that don't pretend to be humans or ones that don't fake human engagement) should be allowed and regulated.

The bad ones though ruin the experience for everyone (and defraud advertisers).

I've previously attempted to classify bots somewhat:

https://medium.com/@iTrendTV/dumb-bots-have-ruined-twitter-s...

I propose marking bots as such. Keep following useful bots. But users will at least know that a troll is automated and are able to act accordingly without wasting time and energy.

Posts and interactions like likes or retweets via the api should be marked as automated, but identifying users as bots is problematic and not very useful as there are good bots and bad bots.

Many users use some automation and that’s a good thing, e.g. posting blog posts when published, bots to repost top #shithnsays for those who want to follow it, that amusing horse books bot etc.

More problematic than bots to me are the many many ways the twitter platform simply rewards the wrong thing, from verified nazis to crowds of trolls and spamming hashtags.

What about the many third party Twitter apps some users prefer to use as opposed to the official client?

They could just identify those as 'posted from x', as twitter should know.

Why is it problematic to mark a good bot as a bot?

It's problematic to identify accounts as bots. Many accounts are partially posting from a bot and partially posting from a human, so what are they? Better to do that at the level of individual posts then the user would see right there that something was posted by the api, and it'd be harder for political spambots for example to flood threads, you could have options to turn off api posts for a thread. This would drive some bots to use selenium etc (perhaps some do already), but I think would be more effective than just marking accounts somehow as 'bot' with fallible detection methods.

Also most of the problems on twitter are caused by humans, not bots. Humans can be cruel, harass, bombard victims with messages, threaten them with death, rape etc (this is regularly happening right now to women on twitter), and those are the more problematic interactions. Yes sometimes spambots liking posts or replying to posts are annoying, or the ones that DM you are pretty bad, but they're not as annoying as humans at their worst.

"Replicants are like any other machine: they're either a benefit or a hazard."

Yes. Make bots legitimate, with verified bot status for ones that are truthful and helpful to the end users.

Couldn't Twitter immediately improve "reputation" by having people display badges based on verified link to other accounts (social, whatever)? Maybe even take it as far as Airbnb does with the copy of your license.

I use Twitter daily, but mostly as a news feed, or with people I already know in real life. There is no point in engaging with a random person on Twitter, because it's quite often a bot or someone that wants a fight.

> The definition of a bot could be problematic though. If a bot is merely automated posting, then virtually every company, news org, website, and anything else that uses automated posts is a "bot", and are those bad? I don't think so, those are useful. The problematic bots are basically automated trolls.

Except if you see that for example the BBC's World News account is a bot, that makes sense because the BBC isn't a person, it's an organization.

The problem is bots masquerading as individual people.

Marketing bots and plugins on Twitter are 3 things.

- A reason not to pay to advertise on twitter

- A way to make the platform look more active than it is

- A distraction to users looking for conversations

I think part of the problem here is twitter can't decide what it is.

Is it a place for people to chat with friends?

Is it a platform for free speech or are there limits to that speech?

Is it a platform for brands/people to broadcast to a broad set of followers?

Is it a source of news and a place to talk about politics or what is going on?

It can't be all of those things.

Twitter's UI is an example of this.

It seems it was not designed with any purpose or philosophy in mind.

It is not good for reading text. Not good for reading conversations. Not good for looking at images.

I do admit that they got the scroll until your finger is sore thing down.

Its still useful for providing feedback.