Twitter is finally cracking down on bots | Hacker News Reader

Twitter is finally cracking down on bots

techcrunch.com

Active discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16434875

That all seems pretty reasonable, mainly geared towards reducing coordinated amplification of content and not just about taking down bots. The original Twitter dev post [1] lays it out quite clearly.

I run a single bot for myself [2] that takes the tweets of one (hilarious) account and either retweets them or slightly modifies the original content and tweets that out. This seems to fall in line with what Twitter is now recommending: retweet instead of copy and paste content to multiple accounts, and do not massively coordinate across many accounts.

[1]: https://blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us/topics/tips/2018/au...

[2]: https://github.com/jlyman/CleanIve

What about social media marketing? Services like buffer and hootsuite, or enterprise solutions that many tech companies use? Plenty of them have multiple accounts (like Twitter, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and more...) and share similar or same tweets among them. It's a very grey area – if the tweet has different text but the same message, is it ok with the guidelines or not? Let's take Twitter for example: https://twitter.com/TwitterAPI/status/966367370708176897 https://twitter.com/TweetDeck/status/966380629674700800

I don't know if it will catch on or what will happen to it if it will, but Mastodon right now is a wonderful place of "censorship" that I'm really enjoying (@JordiGH@mathstodon.xyz in case anyone wants to say hi). I hope they also figure out how to censor bots should they ever become a large enough target to attract them.

I tried mastodon last year, but the federated timeline is still very random. I wonder how to find good people to follow :) @f055@mastodon.matrix.org

ohai, I was wondering who you were.

Yeah, the federated timeline is a bit odd. I'm not exactly sure how I got started, but I did look at the randomness for a bit and started picking up people that looked interesting, and, ahem, socially networked my way into their network to find more interesting people to interact with. If they boosted or talked to someone, I checked out that person to see if they were someone I would like to interact with too. It also helped to start from an instance that had a local timeline that I liked. Also, when I noticed someone was knitting, I asked them about it, and they gave me pointers on the #mastokal tag to look at, from where I found more knitters and more interesting people.

It requires a bit more participation than what I understand you can do for Twitter, which already curates from the beginning a starting point. Now that I'm done with that bootstrapping, I'm really enjoying the conversations I am having there.

You might enjoy browsing the #tootorial tag and see if you learn anything, e.g. https://dev.glitch.social/@cassolotl/99520886210579519

I'd like to know Reddit's plans here, as with manipulation bots.

Considering how much /u/spez loves [0] The_Donald, which is well-known for using bots [1] as well as breaking other reddit "rules" such as inciting violence, I doubt much at all.

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/7a4bjo/time_...

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/MarchAgainstTrump/comments/69lda5/p...

Seems the time is neigh for Proof of ( human ) Identity.

Something akin with Captchas / Turing tests, but antifragile against gamification, with requisite incentives, and without adverse surveillance.

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