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Comment by pound | Hacker News Reader

re: "idiots at Twitter" - It's always nice to encounter someone smart on internet.

I once wanted to have a Twitter account without a phone number attached to it.

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.

I assume this is sarcasm, so I’d like to point out that I don’t consider myself smarter than anyone else or anything - I say idiots simply because there’s no excuse where blatantly obvious spam (for example the crypto currency scam replies in response to famous accounts like Elon Musk) isn’t deleted automatically.

If you know how to reliably solve that easy problem I'm pretty sure they're hiring

Solving that particular problem is not hard: trash any reply to a celebrity or viral tweet that includes a link and gets reported x times. There was a good Twitter thread on this recently, pointing out that we look for complicated solutions when simple ones would do. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/987602838594445312.html

> Solving that particular problem is not hard: trash any reply to a celebrity or viral tweet that includes a link and gets reported x times.

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.

If you’re relying on reports that can be gamed.

> Automated systems can and will be gamed as well.

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.

Automatically flag any account making a reply with the same name or same picture. It's incredibly simple yet they don't do it.

I’m sure their engineers (if they still have any - I haven’t seen any innovation from Twitter in a long time) are more than capable of fixing this if management lets them.

Hiring more engineers isn’t going to solve it. Management and product is where the real problem is IMO.

To be fair, if the only thing they're geniuses as is making a money pit look attractive to investors.

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