Honest question, why can Elon, and only Elon solve the bot problem? Software devs have been trying to solve this problem since the beginning of the internet and yet bots still fill every space on the web.
I don't think _only_ Elon can solve this problem, but one way of looking at the problem is that Twitter appears to be hesitant to 'solve' the bot problem because their most important metric that drives stock price is the number of engaged users, which includes bots. Taking twitter private (is this actually what Elon is doing? I haven't been following very closely) potentially removes the need to focus on this metric, freeing them to 'solve' the bot problem and not worry about the effect on the stock price when the # of engaged users drops by 40%.
For legacy implementation reasons, the backend service that published messages to Twitter would lose 1-2 queued messages every time the service was redeployed. Bleakly, the engineering team decided to not consider this a major issue, despite it being a core competency of the platform. It was simply extremely unlikely anything of value was being lost.
Obviously in the longterm it hurts value, but "doing things that don't scale" creates a lot of degrees of freedom (user growth, cashflow, funding) that you can use to pay off your "tech debt".
He could "Make Twitter Great Again" by killing the bots, and rage-engagement, and making Twitter interesting and fun again. If that raises Twitters value by 10% he gets a $4.5B return.
Publicly traded companies are too often affected by short sighted investors.
I don't think this would ever change unless they go private with someone that has no intention of selling it. I have no idea how successful Elon would be at removing them, but at least he intend to try to do it.
While I'm an optimist in real life, unfortunately I don't have much reason to believe anything will improve, particularly due to Musk. He is hardly the most reasonable or grounded person. (Mind you, as a twitter user I do hope it improves.)
How do you reckon he’ll do that?
Surely the biggest outgoing for marketing departments is paying for 'active users'.
Edit: spelling
Mostly, I think this is going to end up being one of the most expensive acts of individual hubris in history. It's strange from someone whose other notable projects have such clear goals. "Moar free speech lmao" doesn't sound measureable, let alone achievable while also making bank.
But mature media giants are supposed to lose money, right?
Did you just make up a ridiculous quotation and then attribute the sound of it to Musk ?
To me it seems that he's the only one who wants to.
They (twitter) remove a lot of volume because it doesn't fit with their political narrative, even though this is financially detrimental to them.
Do you have those statistics on hand? I don't, so I was asking.
I know the stock price is substantially lower than its peak 1+ yrs ago -- it's easy to find a graph of that -- but it's not obvious to me that this is the result of Twitter's politics rather than other factors.
Meanwhile everybody else does seem to see bots as a problem. So even if Elon wants to, I doubt he's the only one.
What makes you think users want any of this?
Frankly, most of the suggestions I've seen coming out of the SV "thought leaders" about what to do with Twitter are terrible. The bot problem isn't easily solved, and adding a ton of friction and/or reducing anonymity isn't going to be some huge boon to the platform.
That is already a thing if you are verified and one of the reasons why "blue checkmark for $2" (Elon's plan) won't work and will make many verified people unhappy. They don't want even more peasants and "cloud chasers" in their verified timeline.
Frankly, I think Reddit could do the same and give more weight to upvotes from those that prove they’re real.
It could help with disinformation problems and with finding signal.
<edit>I found the quote [0], which I had quoted in my essay "Why Twitter Should Verify More Users: Towards a More Human Web" [1]:
> Facebook’s killer feature was that it replicated the real world by forcing people to use their real names, whereas MySpace users used pseudonymous handles
[0]: https://www.yahoo.com/news/former-myspace-ceo-explains-why-1...
[1]: https://medium.com/hackmentalhealth/why-twitter-should-verif...
</edit>
I know one of the things I loved about Facebook was interacting with university-verified humans. Then it got flooded with more and more spam accounts.
I hope either these platforms or the next generation of platforms realize there is a strong opportunity for real-name policy platforms. It won't be the whole market, but I'm personally really tired of anonymous accounts. I mostly come to HN because there aren't many real-name platforms that talk about these things. Maybe that's because lots of people don't want it. I guess I just don't buy that argument. I think there's a niche for sure.
He must think it will work?
2. Most of the Twitter bots people are worried about when they talk about bots are state-funded.
If companies can't prevent a self-funded scalper, what makes you think Twitter will be able to prevent Russia? There are a lot of ways to obfuscate payments so they don't look to be coming from the same source. Even more ways when you control the banks.
But... scalpers do this, especially so. As far as a retailer is concerned, a scalper is every bit as 'real' as any other customer.
I work in this field and to be honest, the main reason retailers have issues curbing bots is that they don't really spend much resource on it. It's a game of cat and mouse, there's constant work that needs to be done but there's a lot of low hanging fruits that the vast majority of retailers don't do to block bots. And, no, just setting up perimeterx and calling it a day is not enough.
Now, if it succeeds, that does create an incentive for corruption within Twitter. The enemies of democracy have huge incentives to keep up these divisive public influence campaigns that have worked this past decade.
Then THAT gets sold to the Depts of Defense, Homeland Security, and whoever else wants.
I feel it’s fair to say we do.
Because if a checkmark costs $1/month for example, then spending a couple grand to be able to turn any story you want into "trending" is chump change for corporations, governments, and any particularly motivated silicon-valley salary'd employee.
There are already services which essentially sell you retweets - all this is is an adjustment to their business model to sell "verified retweets" and "aged verified retweets" (in case you want accounts with a posting history to do it).
It's a cost model adjustment, that might not even cost that much - after all if "verified" accounts receive less scrutiny from anti-bot algorithms, then they'd be cheaper to run then the developers/workers who need to keep your sockpuppet farm ahead of the game.
Get a face from a thispersondoesnotexist.com like generator. Get the format of the ID in a template, fill in random but realistic data. Like for example, 1000 names for each race-gender combo. Realistic zip codes and addresses from another source.
It’s about a weeks work to get it working to production quality, but it can be easily done.
For bonus credit, see if you can generate an image of the same person holding up this ID. Harder, but not impossible.
What’s frustrating is, those of us who work or have worked in Integrity have already discussed all of this for years. We know the easy solutions, the low hanging fruit. It’s not that helpful when a bunch of people say “why don’t you just charge $2 a month”
Non-government actors can get in on the action by procuring IDs in other ways ("Make money by scanning your late maw-maws ID"[1]), or large scale phishing campaigns (fake jobs or college admissions abroad with 100% applicant success rate, the only catch is scanned IDs and qualifications are required).
Electronic forgeries are likely the best way to do it at scale; just the other day, therr was a top story ok faking as if your document was scanned. Do the fine people handling verifications at Twitter know what a legit Madagascan ID looks like?
1. Or "Get $10,000 funeral assistance from this new Biden admin relief program"
> Do the people at Twitter know what a legit Madagascan ID looks like?
Yes, there are guides for checking ID cards, how do you think that they check ID cards in real life?
Oh no, I've broken the ID forgery laws of Burkina Faso and am in big trouble now. Isn't it a rule of low-level scamming to always target jurisdictions away from your own? State-actors don't care about commiting crimes against themselves, only the mid-level, "semi-pro" threat actors care about avoiding major crimes.
Is that assumption correct? It seems incredibly wrong to me, but I may be misinformed.
Those are also not really the problem.
For a lot of other people on Twitter, the pseudo-anonymity is a feature not a bug.
I’d pay if it allowed me to filter out garbage.
It’s like paying for the removal of commercials.
I don’t believe Musk intends to require people to be publicly identified.
I don’t believe I follow anyone anonymous on Twitter.
Authenticated real people are more valuable to advertisers.
If it’s only for verification they, yeah, they might be fine as long as the verification fee is optional.
A few bucks a month is nothing these days for dedicated netizens who want their social drug of choice.
Elon has the cash + clout to solve the problem. Is he unique in the ability to solve it? No. But he may be in a unique position to solve it.
Just see the top comments here:
APIs need to use actual headless browsers in order to generate the appropriate signature.[1]
Maybe s̶o̶m̶e̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶4̶3̶B̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶ ̶g̶o̶ ̶t̶o̶w̶a̶r̶d̶s̶ ̶a̶ ̶s̶i̶m̶i̶l̶a̶r̶ ̶s̶y̶s̶t̶e̶m̶ the rise in valuation, and Elon's involvement, can bring in some more money for the company itself for these kinds of endeavors.
Hopefully the rise in valuation, and Elon's involvement, can bring in some more money for the company itself for these kinds of endeavors.
https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/blob/master/yt_dlp/extracto...
I have no idea, but he’s a better bet than most other folks I’d say.
Will he succeed? I’d bet not, but I can’t think of someone better to try.
Combating fraud was a key technical challenge in building PayPal and bad actors on that network had more direct financial incentives to write them because PayPal was transmitting money rather than social updates.
Levchin was PayPal's CTO and is also deeply technical.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20140802011449/http://www.forbes...
Fortunately, people can and regularly do gain expertise in multiple things! Just as learning how to program doesn't destroy one's previously acquired drawing or writing skills, learning how to manage capital doesn't destroy someone's ability to combat fraud or detect malicious bots.
More narrowly, I buy that this is true for some segment of the tweeting population. I know this is provocative, but removing those false positives from Twitter may be a good thing.
I have a Twitter account that I use very casually (1 tweet/month, maybe), and I'm 100% sure that my activity is not replicable by a bot.
I'd no longer call myself an expert, but I used to work in conversational AI and have kept up with the research. The latest language models are incredibly exciting, but they're still not at the level where they can simulate a non-braindead tweeter.
The above is more of an amusing thought experiment than an actually-feasible approach. Aggressive removal of botlike users would have to be opaque enough that it'd cut against the free speech objective that Musk has been promoting. But I will say that, at a smaller-scale, the best communities I've ever participated in have had incredibly strong content neutrality norms alongside robustly-enforced civility norms.
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-04-12/musk-is-of...
Elon can afford to think long-term.
Judging by their past actions they were far more interested in using Twitter as a propaganda platform than worrying about it making money.
On the other hand, why are bots not considered a result of free speech? I'm not free to run hogwild on your platform with bots? That's censorship!
This is the official death of Twitter.
I would not bet on it - as far as I understand it, fighting spam is like 95% of what engineers at Twitter do and openly available ML on GPUs seem plenty strong - but it is a possibility.
frankly I'm jelous and wish I could do that.
He can't and he is unlikely to want to.
1. as a public company, they are afraid to lose so many accounts - see Netflix as an example on what could happen to their stock
2. bots are the future, at some point I think everyone will have a bot to post for them
Those who post quickest have a higher chance of not getting lost in the noise and that is where bots will probably be used first by individuals as well.
With that said, hopefully this not the future and new ways of moderating and presenting information will be invented, but the way things are now, it's a slug-fest and the fastest and loudest often wins.
I can see people setting up some form of pre-loaded opinion/responses based on what they want to be seen as..e.g. if $OPINION_I_DISLIKE print $YOU_BAD else print $YOURE_RIGHT! but that seems like it's pretty limited as to completely not work in practical human communication
Also note: that's not the same thing as saying "Twitter shouldn't require identification to register" (though personally I don't think that it should). It's just to say that it's WAY more complicated than "bots vs. ID".
Why is this comment not signed with your full name?
How do you feel about inevitable leaks and your identity being stolen?