Hacker News Reader

Comment by DonHopkins | Hacker News Reader

It would be awesome if the New York Times shared the tools they've developed for this article to identify and analyze bots!

I usually hate those scroll-responsive animated web pages, but the scrolling illustrations and data visualizations in this article were particularly well done and pretty amazing. Not just pretty (the initial face sequence) and clever (the scrolling iPhone) but also actually useful and relevant (like the subscriber graph data visualizations expanding over time). I would love to know more about the tools they used to make those too.

A plea to NYT from a subscriber: Please share some of that great software you've developed, and publish it on your github account!!!

https://github.com/NYTimes

View on HN

Investigations graphics editor here — as it happens a lot of the tools we use are open source! The interactive components were all built with Svelte (https://svelte.technology) and Rollup (https://rollupjs.org/guide/en).

We'd like to eventually open source some of the stuff we built to do the analysis as well, though it depends on time and priorities.

Thank you for those links, and your great work. If Twitter refuses to do the kind of investigation and analysis that you performed because they're making too much money from bots, then the free press and open source community needs to take up the slack!

Hey Rich! The graphics are on point for this article. I really liked the unfading faces at the start. Also, the times should put a tip jar on these kinds of articles, I'm not an avid reader to subscribe, but would want to appreciate any good articles I find.

On the graphics, it looks like the density changes for the rest of the dates whenever the identified bot families show up (creating the differently colored columns). When the identified bot families stop, the density changes back. Is that an artifact of how you're displaying it, or is it an indication that the followers before/after are also bots, but they've been mixed with bots created at other dates, where the bot families identified are just the low quality (non-mixed) bot families?

NYT has a history of hiring engineering rockstars. I believe creators of libraries like BackboneJS, UnderscoreJS, and D3 were at NYT when they had invented those amazing pieces of work.

In fact, the creator of Backbone and Underscore — Jeremy Ashkenas — worked on this article until he left the NYT last year (to join the creator of D3, Mike Bostock, at https://observablehq.com)

I think Bostock had already created D3 by the time the NYT hired him: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/3k3if4/hi_...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com