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Comment by rPlayer6554 | Hacker News Reader

To me (who doesn't use Twitter) this seems like a fair solution. If you are running a legitimate bot I don't see what you have to hide. It's only people trying to be intentionally deceptive that have to worry.

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Twitter makes its money as a marketing engine. Who can say what marketing is deemed intentionally deceptive? I'm not a Twitter user either but it seems to me an obvious question.

Most bots aren't marketing bots, they're sort of... Goofs, or utilities, or projects. Like @MyDudes_, which posts a picture of a frog every Wednesday. Or alttextbot, which if you follow it, DMs you when you've posted a picture without alt text. Or wwiiInRealTime. Or wintbot_neo, which is inexplicable outside of twitter but serves only comedic purpose.

> Most bots aren't marketing bots,

wouldn't you need to know how many marketing bots there are to determine that?

making statements about goodbots/(goodbots+badbots) is difficult when the good bots already make it clear they're bots, and the bad bots are misleading.

> Most bots aren't marketing bots, they're sort of... Goofs, or utilities, or projects.

In my experience those kinds of boutique/indie bots appear to make up a tiny percentage of total bots. If you have data that shows otherwise, I'd appreciate if you could share it.

They're the kind people engage with. There's obviously a lot more astroturfing and disinformation, but most corporate marketing on twitter is done by humans. Steak-Umm, Oreo, Microsoft, Wendy's, even indie game publishers have a human running their accounts.

You seem to be anonymous here on HN, why don't you use your full name instead if you have nothing to hide and you're not intentionally deceptive?

No, privacy doesn't work like that. Even people who are not trying to deceive others are deserving of privacy as well.

Most of my accounts (except one) on the internet are anonymous, as I don't want people to tie anything I do for fun on the internet to my real-life persona. It doesn't mean that I want to deceive people, only that I want my meatspace life to be something else than my online life.

Your bot could be anonymous, the only thing you'd be forced to reveal is that it was a bot.

just a [bot] marker of some kind next to the tweets that were posted by a bot. That's it. Still anonymous.

I could tell you this comment was posted by a bot, that would reveal nothing about me.

Anonymity is fine, they were saying that bots should be labeled as bots.

> privacy doesn't work like that

Except we aren't discussing private conversations. We are discussing broadcast conversations on twitter.

Without tying your anonymity to something else (whether it’s another anonymous account or a real world identity) it’s impossible to determine whether you want to deceive or not, no?

In any case real identities have been a failure anyway

There's plenty you could have to hide as a user on HN. But what reason does a bot have to hide the fact that it's a bot?

You people and your absolutes. Nobody is saying that every anon is deceitful and untrustworthy- just that you need to make sure your BS detector is working.

I don't see how "I am a bot, beep boop" is a privacy issue.

But a bot isn't a person. And you don't have to reveal who made the bot, just that it's a bot. Can you give me a good use case for a bot that is not some kind of manipulation and would still benifit from humans not knowing it's a bot? Usually you want people to know so they aren't confused why the account acts werid i.e. unhuman.

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