Twitter suspended our Open Data project's account and wiped all our followers
openbenches.org
openbenches.org
>Yes, I know. We should redecentralize and put our content on Mastodon, or the BlockChain, or some other convoluted platform which has no users. But that’s just not practical for a small project. We have limited technical resources and have to go to where the people are.
Despite there being better technical options, those options can't be considered just on their technical merits... User adoption is also crucial.
Secondly, I use Mastodon, and I'm on an instance with just over 1000 users. There are over 150K users on the main instance.
For most people I know and follow, that's like, the low bar of twitter follower counts.
And the smaller instances don't suffer the Twitter firehose problem. The instances I use, I watch all the toots, not just those of people I follow. So it's not the number of followers that matters, per se, it's the number of people who see what you say. On Twitter that will only be your followers, but on Mastodon it's pretty much everyone on the instance (for the smaller instances). More, you can be followed by, and have your toots seen by, people on other instances.
But my other point remains - there is no need to be exclusively on one or the other. It's comparatively trivial to put everything on both media.
If you can do that, and you care about your audience (quantity and quality), why wouldn't you?
That's exactly the point though. If you put amount of people you are likely to reach above technical problems, then going solely to a service where the "high" follower count is 1/100th of the high follower counts on another is completely stupid.
> But my other point remains - there is no need to be exclusively on one or the other. It's comparatively trivial to put everything on both media.
Oh, I agree.
Price's well-known square root law states that half of the literature on a subject will be contributed by the square root of the total number of authors publishing in that area....
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222619181_Price%27s...
Mastodon Monitoring Project
https://mnm.social https://dashboards.mnm.social
Also: http://sp3r4z.fr/mastodon/general
About 1.3 million users, 120m statuses (I believe that's cumulative).
Twitter: https://www.statisticbrain.com/twitter-statistics/
~700m users, ~340m active.
58m tweets/dy.
I'd compare sqrt of both. That's ~1,100 vs 26,000 top users.
And if they're saying interesting things, why do you care if they turn out to have a different lifestyle from yours?
Pick a different instance and try again.
When someone is telling you that their experience of a product or service sucks, and you tell them to use it differently, you're failing to understand them.
And Mastodon is not Twitter. Twitter does have some advantages over Mastodon, and if that's what you want or need, then great.
But if you want a quality audience, Mastodon might be a reasonable alternative, and criticising it for not being the same as Twitter, or using the same metrics that you use for Twitter, is misguided.
I'm not good at analogies - never have been - but let me try one. If someone tells me that their experience of using my car sucks and I point out that it's a stick-shift and not an automatic, that's not my failure to understand them, that's me providing information to try to help them get the most out of an alternative experience.
Choosing an instance that matches your interests is part of the federated/non-centralised experience. It's different, and for some, like me, there is value in that difference.
To build on your analogy, your distinction between stick shift and automatic in your car is not relevant to the person who needs a pickup truck to haul a large load. It misses the point of what the OP is trying to achieve in the first place.
As far as why I care, it's because these interesting people very understandably want to talk about their lifestyle choices, and I don't really want to hear about it. (Just like how I'm okay with people smoking in their homes, but I find their smoke distasteful.) It made the signal-to-noise ratio for me a little too low for pleasure.
And if there are people who say really interesting things mixed in with stuff you don't care about, that's a problem everywhere. There are a few things you can do. One is that you can use regex's to filter out stuff you're not interested in. Another is that you can choose to follow only people who don't talk about the other things, and trust that they will boost the things that you care about from others.
But it's a social medium, so there will be a mix. You can control it to some extent, but I've found the tools in Mastodon to be much more powerful than those in Twitter.
Following a mirror account is less interesting.
Just like how a mirror repo on GitHub is less interesting to star than a repo that has GitHub as its designated main location.
I also can't figure out where to start. I don't feel that way about Twitter.
And you can either join one or run your own.
"Here, Doreen, here's my email address and my phone number. Don't hesitate to contact me. Happy to explain like you are my clueless little sister until you feel comfortable."
I think you are thinking of Mastodon primarily as a technical platform. I am thinking of it primarily as a social environment.
When I was active on Metafilter, there was a new social platform all the members were talking about. It was invitation only. I was homeless at the time and I was generally treated pretty badly by most members there. Nonetheless, someone gave me an invitation and I joined. And it was pointless because what few people I did recognize were people with a track record of treating me terribly.
If people have little walled gardens, but are hesitant for any reason to admit me to their inner circle, then there's no there there for me.
Sure, I can figure out the technical details, if I have reason to. But I don't have sufficient connection to have reason to. Walled gardens serve an inner circle of people. I don't belong to any inner circle that are using Mastodon.
Perhaps that will change. But it won't likely change by joining Mastodon. It might change by somehow becoming an insider somewhere with a group that already uses and prefers the platform.
For now, I strongly recommend that you establish an account at mastodon.social. It's the instance with the most users and therefore has the most local content to follow and the widest possible reach.
https://github.com/tootsuite/documentation/blob/master/Using...
https://github.com/tootsuite/documentation/blob/master/Using...
This isn't rocket surgery. Or solving the homeless & mental health crises.
Sign up at https://Mastodon.social (big main Engish-mostly instance), or I can vouch for https://toot.cat (run by a friend, Woozle). I'm @dredmorbius at multiple instances, though I mostly monitor mastodon.cloud (which has been increasingly flaky).
https://mastodon.theubergroup.org
There is one writer there I follow and whose posts I enjoy:
https://mastodon.theubergroup.org/@eleanor
Look at who she's following to get an idea of other people you might consider interesting.
Also look at the #GetOnOurLawn hashtag. You have to be logged in to an instance to search for it.
EDIT: My mistake, it is possible to view hashtags without logging in. Here it is from wandering.shop, an instance larger than the one I suggested above:
The biggest problem I've found is content discover. Mastodon works well for new users if the instance you're on has others who follow users that interest you - otherwise, silence. There is no way that I've found to search the entire multiverse, and no easy way to bootstrap an instance by connecting to other instances or other instances' users en masse.
if (true) {
deny_appeal();
}
For 1 to accounts do ban account()
A bot will not appeal the ban, while human will appeal!
All the data is on openbenches.org and GitHub.
Though you should carefully examine just that.
[1]: https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-limit...
> A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
Causing data loss from a poorly-trained robot's incorrect call is unacceptable. Fix your bits, Twitter.
We could try to shift it all to sentence case, but that might lose the meaning of proper nouns.
Thanks for the suggestion though, that's the first thing which has made sense about the banning.
I often have a similar problem and the fact is that most users hang out on platforms that suck like Twitter, Facebook, etc.
If I build my business on a decentralized platform like blockchain etc. I immediately lose 90% or even more of my target audience.
If I build my business on my own datacenter the cost and maintenance involved is staggeringly high.
Do you have a reasonable alternative that would allow small players like us to host large volumes of data (say about 1 TB to 2 TB) while completely controlling the ownership of the data?
You'll have to hire some engineers to maintain this, but it won't be as bad as building a datacenter. And it's what you'll need to do to avoid being a sharecropper on someone else's platform.
That rules out small projects and requires monetization.
At the time of this comment, the fediverse has about 1.2 million accounts. It's not that hard to get hundreds of followers there.
Having said that, anecdotally I find it very hard to get people outside of a relatively narrow demographic to get on board with it. More than one fairly technically literate friend of mine has stopped about at the point where they're confronted with the choice of what instance to create an account on, especially if they choose and then get told "no, that instance is full, go create one somewhere else." It's not clear that the instance, at least theoretically, doesn't matter.
Note I say "theoretically," because it turns out it can matter. If the instance you choose is maintained poorly, your experience may be worse. (This is in fact my experience.) And it's not clear how to migrate between instances while keeping your social graph intact. Mastodon has a long way to go in terms of user experience to be accessible to people who aren't dedicated enough to the idea of a decentralized Twitter alternative to put up with this stuff.
Last but not least: it's hard for me not to notice that in the year or so I've had a Mastodon account, it's been very hard for me to discover people to follow, especially after the occasional burst of new users dies down. The people I followed are, except for two or three folks who are clearly dedicated to it over Twitter for philosophical reasons, mostly...just not using it now. (Of the two dozen people I followed, my timeline is now pretty much just content from two users, one of who is only "there" because his blog crossposts automatically.) You know where most of them are still active? Twitter.
tl;dr: it might be great for a project like OpenBench to also be on Mastodon, but not exclusively be on it.
1. To start with the end, nobody's suggesting they're exclusively on Mastodon (which is not the only Fediverse tool, there are others), and they absolutely should syndicate far and wide. However, posting to Mastodon/Pleroma/Whatever first and syndicating the content elsewhere means that if this happens again, they don't lose tweets.
2. Drawing from a pool 300x bigger doesn't make for 300x better interactions. Generally Fediverse SNR seems to be better, but this is more or less so depending upon interest and representation. Bear in mind OP's twitter account had followers in the hundreds, like my Mastodon account does. I have thousands on twitter, but I only interact with maybe 50-100 people there.
3. WRT your friend, there's now https://joinmastodon.org/, which will guide them to an instance. Your friend is not required to use Mastodon to participate in the Fediverse. There are other tools out there. They're all linked (you can use Pleroma and read Mastodon toots for example). The whole point of the fediverse is that it isn't a walled garden and that you own your content.
4. There are tools to assist with migrating Mastodon accounts but they're early stage. I agree this sucks, but in it's defence it's because Mastodon is new and expanding and the tools are improving.
5. This was the bit I wanted to talk about:
> it's been very hard for me to discover people to follow
Yup. I completely agree. The solution however is right under your nose. The way to find people to follow in the Fediverse is:
1. Search for hashtags you're interested in.
2. Find people using those hashtags and check out their feeds.
3. Look at who they follow and check those people out.
This is how every social network pretty much used to work, and fundamentally is down to the fact that in the fediverse you own your presence, your data and your network which means you are responsible for it. There's nobody pushing for engagement, nobody making money from filling your feed with ads. The price is personal responsibility.
If you think that's too high a price to pay, that's fine. Stay in the walled garden with curated content and risk having all the content you produced for corporations for free so they could sell ads to be pushed to you and your friends erased at the drop of a hat without explanation.
And you can say it'll never work, it'll never replace twitter or facebook. But HN will never replace Reddit and Lobsters will never replace HN, yet both are doing pretty well for the communities they serve. Once you bend your head around the concept that fediverse communities as a whole have no interest in replicating Twitter or Facebook it starts to make a lot more sense.
I should be clear that I like Mastodon despite all my complaints -- it's just that I often feel as if I like it more in theory than practice. I've had better luck with Micro.blog, which is a different approach to the same problem (i.e., own your own content), built on top of webmentions and syndication feeds. But I'm not sure it's really a better approach, just different.
What we've lost is our social graph. That's not something which can easily be decentralised.
I haven’t even bothered to log in and fix it.
We only had a few hundred, not bad for a parochial project on the psychogeography of memorials, but now we had zero.
They currently have 396, including me.
OpenBenches.org @openbenches Made with in Oxford by @edent and @summerbeth openbenches.org 393 Following 427 Followers
I don’t expect the system to be bulletproof and remove advanced spam rings, but when obvious spam is allowed to stay on the platform I’m wondering what the idiots at Twitter are really doing.
Taking an user’s reputation, account lifetime, reputation of their followers, etc (so for example, a report from a new account has less weight than an established account with a good history) will sort that out.
And when everything else fails, a proper appeals system where you talk to humans will solve this problem once and for all. False positives and abuse are bound to happen eventually, but they’re tolerable as long as you have a proper appeals process to deal with them.
That's trivial to abuse, given a group of accounts filing false reports.
That's not a hypothetical; as an example, Facebook's reporting functionality has been abused to attack people's accounts as part of various hate campaigns.
Hiring more engineers isn’t going to solve it. Management and product is where the real problem is IMO.
It got banned within 5 minutes of being created, I didn't use Tor, proxy or anything shady, a normal Chrome browser and a normal gmail account. All I did was Tweet once (their own localized hell world tweet where I didn't even fill in the text).
Reason was something that amounted to breaking their ToS via 'automated use' or some shit. Of course if I were to provide my mobile number it'd get instantly unlocked, 0 human oversight on that too.
Opening a support ticket sent me their automated crap email saying the same thing and asking for phone number again to instantly get my 10 minutes old account unlocked.
I never heard from a human.
They reap what they sow.
Edit: and by 'without a phone number' I mean I didn't fill it in when creating the account (I don't even remember if it asked there but I somehow got an account open without one), just out of principle of not wanting to give any more information than I need to any service I use. And of course I didn't divulge it after that borderline ransomware situation and my opinion of Twitter has dropped (generously speaking..). It was also my only ever attempt at having a Twitter account, not a secondary account or something like that. I also have a static Polish IP for years now, no other service ever 'caught' me for being a bot, it was in an up to date Chrome on Windows 10, etc.
If you have worked in any company that deals with internet-facing traffic serving the size of audience that Twitter does, it should be obvious that 1k employees is nothing if you want to have all the necessary teams you need to keep the business running, for example, software engineering, software support, hardware engineering, hardware support, network engineering, software engineering, HR, finance, legal, PR, management, IT department, etc.
A company of this scale is not just code and raw technical skills. There are many nuances that you need to appreciate before you understand why it involves 1k-5k employees.
Typically it doesn't happen because it's more profitable to use data scientists to sell more ads.
I've reported someone leaking Polish court documents of an ongoing case on Facebook - nothing happened.
I've reported a YouTube video praising Anders Breivik as an European hero defending whites from Marxists, Leftists and Muslims - it's still up.
I've created a Twitter account and it got instantly locked for being 'suspicious' or 'automated' (but of course giving them my phone number would fix it instantly) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014511
What are the nuances that I'm missing?
I challenge you try and think through why your simple spam filter and human appeals process will not scale to Twitter's size. What kind of throughput can it handle? What happens when there is more content being appealed than the review team can handle? How do you prevent attackers from maliciously flagging other users' content? How do you handle advanced threats where attackers compromise existing accounts then begin to spam, thus bypassing any "easy" checks like looking at account age? How do you classify "hateful" speech? How does it scale to foreign languages, slang, etc?
A constructive comment would have been to point us at good spam filters that are very good at not allowing obvious spam so that we do not make the same mistake that Twitter did and be labelled as "idiots" by the likes of you on the Internet.
Seriously, this problem is not as easy to solve for machines as you think it is.
And email seems like a harder place to police, being decentralized. These guys control the gateway to the service!
The first rule is you don't delete user data without consent. The second rule, is you dont delete user data without consent!
And yes, I work in the industry. Bad shit happens, and data can be lost. But trusting some automated 'spam detection algo' and making actionable, irrecoverable decisions on fuzzy math is completely idiotic, boneheaded, and fucking stupid! If you're in that product team, you deserve every shred of scorn you're getting.
I think some of the reason this comes about is that it's deprioritized until it's a major problem, and you're already at a large scale, and then the decision is "require human review, even of what appears to be a fraction of the deletions, and get swamped with thousands or tends of thousands of reviews immediately", or "just delete them".
That's not an excuse for the decision, since obviously they could have taken care to address this problem at least minimally much earlier, and there wouldn't be a deluge of work, but I think we all understand whey they weren't keen to do that (even if it's a crap decision for their users).
What if they're not idiots? What if that system is working exactly as intended?
Why? If you don't know what the goal is, how can you judge the results? Just because you don't care for the result doesn't make the person who designed the system an idiot. It makes you an idiot for continuing to use a system you hate.
I loved Twitter and I wish they get their stuff together and make it enjoyable again, but I’m not expecting anything anymore. They’re most likely going to go down the same way Yahoo did.
Unlikely. Yahoo actually had to make a profit. In 12 years, Twitter has only reported 1 profitable quarter. And yet, somebody (or somebodies) keep forking over billions of dollars to keep twitter up and running. Whatever their goal is, making money isn't it.
My guess is their goal is the same as the major media outlets: to control the flow of information. It's a lot easier to do that without scrutiny if the tools appear to kick people off at random. The harder it is to discern a pattern, the less scrutiny they'll face when taking down accounts that say things they don't like. It also provides cover if there's a big stink and they have to reinstate an account.
I mean, it works for spam. Obvious bad english, poor spelling and punctuation, etc. weed out people who know this is an obvious scam, leaving only the type of people who will overlook every red flag imaginable because their gullibility and greed overwhelms them.
Focusing on profit.
Not to mention, having spam on the platform isn’t really a good strategy for profit anyway.
I just checked, it's still there https://mobile.twitter.com/ksfAKBARI check followers/following for a massive ring of obvious spam.
Here’s a screenshot of the account just in case this actually works: https://i.imgur.com/xNviClq.png
However this particular account is a spam bot as it occasionally tweets financial frauds such as "yes loans any good (link: yes-loans-any-good.txtloanltd.com) yes-loans-any-good.txtloanltd.com #no fax online loans".
It is bots and the algorithmic timeline (which Twitter spam with lots of people i don't follow) that ruined it for me. The bot issue seems simpler to solve than spam, (a Turing test?) and I can only think that Twitter feel the bots will one day make them profitable.
(Of course, if this were a conscious strategy, they'd probably be better about not destroying following/follower state through a cycle.)
USE someone else's platforms for what they're good at - gather leads and connections and steering them to the platform you own.
OWN your data.
My experience is that even thousands of Twitter followers amount to no real contribution to anything.
Anybody here with a different experience?
They seem fairly repetitive and uninteresting: users use something with no customer service, automated system goes haywire and bans/blocks/disables/inconveniences their account, the only way they have to get it resolved is to make some noise about it, they then return to using the service, nothing changes.
At this point I'm tempted to flag stories like this one that don't have some kind of new angle or widespread interest, but thought I'd see how others are feeling about it first.
Now as for its interest to HN...I thought it was an interesting thing they are doing and I'm glad that I know it exists now.
The general concern here could not be anymore relevant, and discounting that merely because it lacks novelty seems at least decadent and at most snobery.
Without even taking a stance on the issue being discussed, I think we can all agree that these sorts of issues that come up in our society and seem to affect all of us are in our noblest interests to take concern with.
I say we let these articles live.
But, okay. It looks like the general opinion is that it would be inappropriate to flag them.
But, I think these articles are not the result of formula or even a superficial trend. I can’t imagine what the motive would be. Until further notice, these articles seem to mostly be coming from a place of genuine concern.
What if the reason we keep seeing the posts is that the problem is simply that significant?
Speaking from a more personal perspective, I am surprised that the problem continues like it does. It seems like the exact sort of societies are built to prevent. It can ruin livelihoods, can happen to anyone, at any time, the causes are blackboxed, and there is almost always no recourse.
The other is to remind all the startups which frequent this site that their actions have consequences.