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Comment by thinkingemote | Hacker News Reader

They need to re-free up the API. Early adopters and hackers really did some great work using the API until they walled-gardened it and rate limited it to make it unusable. They need to do this for goodwill at the very least, but I think it will spark the fire to make it popular with techies again.

Based on the recently published discovery chats we will probably see:

* High def video

* Focus on music publication

* The highest revenue sharing cut from any social media platform for content creators to get people to switch.

* Removal of twitter blue but some kind of subscriptions to edit tweets

* Paid push DMs to followers (e.g. follow this account for drops, then the tweeter has to pay to tweet to this group)

View on HN

I think it's going to be more in the other direction.

He really hates the bots, so he'll probably close up the API.

Until bots gets solved, no developer should expect the API to open up.

The problem isn't the bots, the problem is the lack of differentiation between bots and real accounts. I say open up the API and let people make whatever bots they wish, but if you tweet through the API then you get a big "BOT" tag next to your username on the feed.

But not every tweet through the api would be bots right? Like someone using a custom twitter client as a single user shouldn't get that label, no?

How are you going to tell?

They can distribute keys associated to an identity and have humans review the apps or bot purpose and content, but charge for the review.

is there anything stopping me from writing a browser extension to make posts on the site automatically? i did work for a guy on that sort of setup spamming used car dealership ads, and it may have been a hastle keeping it running but we got plenty of ads out.

nothing other than the fact that if they find you doing this, they'll likely ban your account.

If the private keys are distributed inside an approved client app then any competent hacker can decompile the binary and extract the keys. At that point the keys can be used by bots or other unauthorized apps, and there's no reliable way for the server to distinguish them.

That's going to be tricky too because I could imagine someone offering a service to actors and other public people to help manage their twitter accounts (maybe discourage them from posting stupid shit at 1 am. I'm looking at you, Elon), in which case you wouldn't even have a 1:1 ratio.

The usual solution, historically, it to provide different levels of service based on your account type. The couple of times I've worked somewhere that the admins had a disjointed set of servers from the users was really a huge stress relief. You want admins to 'see' what the user sees, but to be able to work even if the site is being DOS'ed. And ideally you want users to be able to use the site even if the admins manage to DOS themselves (admin functions tend to have a higher fanout than end user functions, so the danger of catastrophic fanout is always higher).

One option would be to ban custom Twitter clients. As a bonus, enforcing official apps opens more possibilities for monetization. Twitter could even release a special app for advertising agencies who manage multiple accounts on behalf of their customers and charge appropriate subscription.

As a bonus? Maybe for Twitter, but as a user, I would not care for this at all.

My take is banning custom clients should be deemed an ADA violation.

You should be allowed to create your own client for any service you want, that is customized to your input needs.

> Like someone using a custom twitter client as a single user shouldn't get that label, no?

Why not? If it's a niche client not many people use such false positive would be rare. Also such people probably don't have huge audirnce and they and their audiences won't care.

And it might be deterrent against people trying to build popular alternative client that might compete with main twitter app.

I don't think aiming for 100% accurate label is on the table.

> And it might be deterrent against people trying to build popular alternative client that might compete with main twitter app.

That's horrible for users.

Twitter's iOS app is a third-party app they bought because it was so much better than their own at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tweetie

Yeah, but that was then and this is now. Thinghs kinda settled down since then.

The real danger of opening the API and marking all tweets made through API as BOT is that this label looses impact if some alternative client that uses API raises to prominence.

I'd say that current setup where users have no indication that something might have been posted by bot is way more horrible.

Humans are really creative. One potential outcome is a few well known ppl start using a 3rd party client, tell their followers that’s why it says bot, and the badge loses its meaning.

With an open API, you even open up the door to "moderation bots" that autoban users from your timeline if they appear to be bots

Hmm...this may turn into "Ban speech from my account that's promoting right/left wing agenda" moderation bots

Let the bot wars begin

I'm not going to lie, "bot wars" sounds a lot more fun than current Twitter. I want to play.

Those already do kind of exist, I recall scripts existing which can be used to block users from lists, and inevitably those were used for reinforcing echo chambers.

On the other hand, providing users with tools to curate their timelines is much better than having the company shove some arbitrary rulings down everyone's throats.

Edit: In a sense this would be one of the things I have come to really enjoy about running a Misskey instance. The content is all out there on other Mastadon, Pleroma and Misskey instances in the fediverse, both stuff I would enjoy and stuff I would find extremely offensive but that doesn't really matter because what I can see is entirely in my control.

I tweet using the iPhone app Tweetbot. Would my tweets be marked as a bot?

If I were to build a bot I wouldn’t even touch the API. Why not simulate everything through a headless browser and stay under the radar. Then build a farm of those simulations and you can publish/promote everything you desire pretty much undetectable.

> If I were to build a bot I wouldn’t even touch the API.

If you were to build a malicious bot, sure. If you were to build a bot to tweet about the weather in Sheffield, you might as well use the API.

Yeah but the bots that people complain about are the malicious bots that try to pass as humans.

Those become a lot easier to work with when you differentiate them from good-faith bots.

Discord does something similar, although I feel they've gone way too far with policing it.

The idea was about opening the API, and this suggestion was to argument that it makes easier for the malicious bots. So this was suggested to make the API less valuable for that purpose.

I think the only problem would be if this API was used by non-bots (perhaps some relays) and the tag loses its meaning.

I think we need to expand our vocabulary a little on this subject. A lot of people seem to think that these "bots" are just limited to "buy crypto today" type posters.

What they don't realise is that the comment they are reading right now could well have been written by a bot.

His scope covers everything you mentioned, you are the only one limiting it yourself.

> If you were to build a bot to tweet about the weather in Sheffield, you might as well use the API.

I don't think twitter is that place and it hasn't been for a while if it ever was.

I just watched this video again...

https://youtu.be/ddO9idmax0o

To me, the draw of twitter was you could text messages (SMS) to 40404 or get texts from 40404 from people I choose to follow. I had unlimited minutes and unlimited texts but I didn't have an app phone back in 2008 when I signed up for Twitter. The world has changed since then...

I'd say if you were to build a bot to tweet about the weather in Sheffield, you are probably better off setting up your own server to write blog posts or something like that? Maybe look into microdata or RSS or something too?

It's very common to build bots for Twitter. They post on Twitter because there's an audience there. I'm sure there's lots of places I could get an rss weather subscription, but I stopped using rss.

This is a Twitter account that started relatively recently - I like it. https://twitter.com/_restaurant_bot

This sort of bot has had a good place on Twitter for at least a decade, going back to @everyword.

I’m not on Twitter, but I can think a myriad of cases where I wouldn’t want to touch the API without my case being malicious. Like extracting data from the platform, or monitor specific accounts, or monitor trends, or whatever. It doesn’t have to necessarily be a troll farm, or a fake users service. I’m sure the API allows most, if not all of these, but there would be usage quota. You bypass it, and then you can even start a business around it. There are thousands of startups out there providing services for social media monitoring, and I seriously doubt all of them are going through the official API.

This is just kicking the can down the next level on the issue. They can't tell which bots are bots so what difference does it make it if the solution isn't to ban them but to just limit them? The problem is identifying the bots.

Without an API, the default "I want to write a bot for Twitter" path forward is to automate the human UI -- to some extent, this makes you look like somebody who is trying to evade bot detection.

I suspect there are lots of people in the class of "wants to do something interesting, isn't particularly interested in being malicious but doesn't mind breaking the rules." Maybe an official bot API would dry up that ecosystem?

I think the "bot" versus "real" account differentiation is quite irrelevant in practice.

For example, every now and then I check what some elected Canadian politicians have tweeted recently.

Even though these are Twitter accounts that would probably be considered "real", and they often have a check mark, pretty much everything they tweet is, in effect, following a script.

Often, these tweets are just a useless acknowledgement of some obscure holiday celebrated by some unrelated ethnic or religious group that they want the votes of, or they're tweets delivering pointless congratulations for an irrelevant "accomplishment", or they're tweets regurgitating some very specific party talking point that a bunch of other representatives from the same party are simultaneously regurgitating.

These accounts are seen as "real" accounts corresponding to "real" people, yet what they produce is consistently some of the most artificial content I've ever seen.

That's an unusual example. Most posts on twitter are not formulaic recognition of holidays by politicians.

In general, not knowing if a machine or a human wrote a twitter post is a bad thing.

There’s many variations of this.

News outlets and fans tweeting sports results. Public event celebration (new year, xmas, father day etc.). The vast majority of these tweets could be managed by bots and we wouldn’t know the difference.

I actually follow many bots on twitter knowingly, but they could be people in disguise I wouldn’t care.

In my opinion, the content of a tweet (is it spam ? is it abusing the platform ?) matters way more than wether it’s a bot or a human doing the spamming/abuse.

> In my opinion, the content of a tweet (is it spam ? is it abusing the platform ?) matters way more than wether it’s a bot or a human doing the spamming/abuse.

What about replies and retweets? EX: If you have high quality (or good faith) content that's supported/attacked by bots vs real people.

I'm posting this only to further decrease the upvote/comment ratio.

I kinda wish engagement had less effect on content visibility and having a swarm of bots "attacking" a comment wasn't decisive.

Talking about HN comments, some have extremely bad but feel good takes that will garner a huge first wave of upvotes, to then get beaten down as it got more attention, to perhaps get some more sympathy votes as timezones shift.

The interesting part to me is the comment can go all the cycles because it stays there, is still visible even when flagged to death and can be rescued.

That's also how I read reddit, with downvoted to death comments and posts in the timeline. People who care enough should probably do the same for Twitter as well.

Disclaimer: I am not politicaly engaged so have less exposure to the nastier battles where thousands of people shout a each other. I still don't understand why anyone would go there in their free time.

PS: I also don't think there is any one size fits all strategy for a service used by millions of people all over the globe. To me the "divide and conquer" approach reddit takes is a better fit, and expecting Twitter, or any social media to have a good mechanism to deal with social swarms is a pipe dream...dealing with abuse when you can have 5000 ton gorillas throwing their weight in the balance would be a tall order for any private company.

I think TikTok nailed this. They will promote posts to their home page that do not have lots of engagement but but are high quality for the site.

Why do you want to know if a machine or human wrote a tweet? What difference does it make, and where do you draw the line? If I use Grammarly to correct my language in a tweet then did a machine write it? How about if I generate text using GPT-3 and then manually edit it?

Please define your terms.

One is more labour intensive and more expensive. The other can be done at scale for cheap. The negative impacts most likely don’t scale linearly, so volume is an outsized concern.

[not knowing if a machine or a human wrote a twitter post is a bad thing]

And what difference does it make, wether some content was written by an algorithm or it was written by professional staff, when the objective might be the same: to misguide / influence you to act in someone else's favour

A brief conversation is usually all it takes me to notice even the more elaborate bots. I would share my methods, but I'd prefer they not figure it out too quickly. Suffice it to say bots just don't behave the way a human would.

Most politicians are boring. So what? Just don’t follow them.

The problem with bots is not that they are “artificial sounding”. They can and are used for scaming people, they can and are used for manipulating the public discourse.

The problems with bots is they jack up advertisers cost and don't buy things and cannot be influenced. Follow the money.

There are bots on every platform and advertisers are well aware of them.

They simply factor them in as a cost of doing business.

some will also increase engagement though

I think the problem is less that many official accounts are "boring" and more that they are run by staff and don't have the feel of direct communication that makes Twitter interesting to begin with.

Politician social media accounts are mostly run be teams of staffers who are literally paid to manipulate the public discourse. They are no different from bots.

We've arrived to a very satisfying conclusion here: politics has always (mostly) been the biggest of all scams. Wether its a team of script writing artists, or the state of the art machine generated content, its the same worthless junk.

You can grade the junk by halflife.

The purpose of a BOT tag isn’t to indicate quality or intent, it’s not even necessarily derogatory. Real people can be asinine and bots can be useful and informative. It’s to indicate the source was a bot. That’s still useful information.

A BOT tag is a great idea. They should also add the option for authors to disable BOT replies in their threads. Best of both worlds.

Excellent idea, with BOT replies disabled by default please. Mostly people don't want BOT posts.

Useful how? What am I supposed to do with that information? Is it actionable?

Like a politician?

Everything is politics. Without political skills humans wouldn't have landed on the Moon, but it took the shock of a headshot and the legacy of that memory which eventually faded to just about nothing in ten years.

Man, this “manipulating the public discourse” boogeyman has really taken root in people’s brains. The CIA mind control research paid off after all.

Is it not fact that the manipulation of public discourse using bots on social media has taken place at scale?[0][1][2]

When U.S. Presidential elections can be significantly swayed by information warfare campaigns run by malign actors, I can't help but feel that dismissals in such a context are rather aloof, if not out of touch.

[0] https://intelligence.house.gov/social-media-content/

[1] https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/ICA-dec...

[2] https://www.propublica.org/article/infamous-russian-troll-fa...

There's a difference between tried to manipulate and manipulated. We don't know what effect they had. I suspect a miniscule one.

If their efforts yielded minimal results, somebody else must have had success. Online discord seems to have been sown somehow.

Online discord is being sown because there is real world discord. It’s not coming out of thin air. The college educated upper middle class is increasingly pulling away economically from the middle class, and is being increasingly assertive about their value system which is increasingly diverging from the traditional values held by most of the rest of the country. Institutions are breaking down in different parts of the country in different ways—both red America and blue America are less likely to attend church than before, but what they do instead is creating greater gaps between them. Immigration and globalization are bringing an increased pace of change, and the New York Times is calling anyone who objects to that change bigots and racists.

On what basis exactly?

I can't speak for JamesBarney's reasons, but agree with them that it's probably minimal.

Facebook and Twitter have better funded research groups focusing just on the sub-task of knowing what my current state is (a necessary part of being able to tell if you've changed my preferences), and for advertising purposes I am categorised as being into nouns I don't recognise, foods and sports which repulse me, and so on.

I expect the three letter agencies to mix me up with the horror film director I share a name with, and also to confuse me with three pet dogs and two pet cats.

Because there's been lots of research on how much advertising affects election outcomes and it's minimal.( At the federal/state level, in smaller races where voters lack information about either candidate it can be slightly more influential)

I can't imagine a Russian internet trolls with much a smaller reach and lower budget are going to be that much effective than best political ad minds of America at changing our opinions. (For Russian governmental organizational competency see Ukraine)

And then anecdotally I could have predicted every person's i knows vote a year before based on how they felt about woke culture and their party identification.

What’s your evidence for the notion that the presidential campaign was “swayed” by “information warfare?”

The reports that I linked from the U.S. House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and the National Intelligence Council.

What degree of sway is up for debate, but given the documented scale and scope of the efforts, it certainly wasn't zero.

Ah yes, the "Russian Troll" conspiracy theory. Gonna get a lot of big mad downvotes for this one because people actually believe this nonsense.

The public has been able to be swayed by media for a very long time. The CIA in particular has been deeply involved in it [0]. For some reason this was deemed okay, or at the very least acceptable, by the public. The only difference between the CIA controlled media cited and social media is the lack of US government control.

I do appreciate the irony here. That every other election was so-called "free and fair" yet an absolute wildcard gets in for 2016 and the deepest level of coping by every agency in the union was witnessed. I am not a fan of Trump, but if elections are truly "free and fair" then 2016 was legitimate. If 2016 wasn't legitimate, then why would anyone have any reason to believe 2020 was legitimate? I'm not intending to start a conspiracy theory fight here - but rather raise the question that is trying to be asked. If "foreign actors" elected a president in 2016, then whose to say they didn't in 2020? Or 2008? Or 2004? Who can you believe? I'd argue you couldn't believe any agency who might have an interest in having you believe otherwise. Maybe our elections are actually selections and in 2016 the powers that be lost the information war.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_influence_on_public_opinio...

Is it possible that both CIA intervention into public discourse and foreign entities with unknown interests with reach far greater than the largest media outlets in the country[1] are both not ideal? And that one does not excuse the other?

1: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook...

It’s possible to believe both that the 2016 result was legitimate, and that Russian Psyops influenced the result. After all it’s incumbent on the electorate to inform themselves and employ critical thinking in the information they consume, but at the end of the day it’s their choice. That doesn’t mean Russian Psyops is ok, it doesn’t mean CIA Psyops is ok (while noting that you didn’t actually say that they are).

As an external observer (full disclosure, conservative Brit) I deplore both those who try to malign the legitimacy of the 2016 result, and the 2020 result. Even so, I hold a special contempt in my heart for those Americans trying to excuse, justify or even in some cases explicitly encourage foreign covert influence on US elections and obstruct efforts to counteract it. Those people are not even borderline traitors and enemies of democracy, they’re all the way over the line. All IMHO, and it’s not my country.

I remember back then that there was also evidence that China ran some kind of bot campaign[1] but no one really cared and it was never brought up. Ironically your second source says that but again, no one seems to talk about Chinese bot farms or election interference strangely. That same source talks about all the countries that do this. I assume this is pretty routine and the US probably does it in other countries. I don't know why Russia is focused on for this in 2016. I have my guesses.

But then there were investigations into the Russian election swaying campaign. I remember Facebook said that there was no evidence the ads they bought had any impact on anything[2]. There were also groups the trolls made. It's completely unclear what conclusion to draw from them.[3] The article says people mostly didn't follow the groups but that their posts reached people. What conclusion can be drawn from this? Is there any evidence the posts changed people's opinions? Also, one of the weird and counter intuitive things about it is they targeted left wing people.[4]

So I don't see any evidence that an election was significantly swayed. I didn't see it in those sources. I am not trying to make this a left/right thing. I am just saying that yes, there are bot and troll campaigns all over the place. But I don't know if we should conclude that they significantly swayed an election. It's just something to keep in mind. I brought up the China thing because I would think if it was actually a concern then people would have talked about it but how many knew that China, or Venezuela or Iran, were involved in this?

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-china/trump-...

[2]: https://fortune.com/2017/11/01/facebook-google-twitter-russi...

[3]: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook...

[4]: https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-election-facebook-russia...

>So I don't see any evidence that an election was significantly swayed.

Well, in my defense I did say can be swayed. However, I do think there was serious damage done when you take the full scope of Russian influence operations into account.[0]

That said, considering just the troll farm influence alone in an election scenario with tight margins—the 2000 election, for example—it's rather easy to see how it could make the difference.

It's taken seriously for good reason.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...

> Often, these tweets are just a useless acknowledgement of some obscure holiday celebrated by some unrelated ethnic or religious group that they want the votes of

Lol. Yes that's a mandatory part of being a politician. I hardly think that when most people think of the problems of twitter/social media they are thinking of Trudeau tweeting "congrats Mattea Roach on winning 23 consecutive games of Jeopardy" or whatever. Btw, actually I just scrolled through his twitter and his tweets are almost entirely practical https://nitter.it/justintrudeau.

Anyway, the problem here is bot farms creating tens of thousands of sockpuppets posing as "average citizens" to push some sort of narrative and try to manufacture consent, which is qualitatively different from what you are describing.

One of the secrets of getting positive value out of Twitter is to block all or most politician accounts you come across. Mute the names of the popular politician for extra measure.

Exactly this. It takes some work to set up, but the reward is plenty. At least the bare minimum tools are available to enable this. In addition, what other platform even lets you block the advertisers, giving you at least some deciding power over the adds you get.

A politician is an organization, as much as any corporation or brand is. The politician is the owner, spokesperson, and mascot, but the more senior they are the more they have a huge staff that is responsible for what would otherwise be called CEO, CFO, Chief Council, PR, HR, IT, R&D.

And remember that corporations are people too, my friends. But they are very strange kinds of people. When Taco Bell hires a marketing firm to pay a TV station to air a commercial X times, is that a bot? Or even stranger, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut can get into a twitter troll war with each other, even though they're both wholly-owned subsidiaries of Yum! Brands, Inc. and the whole thing could have been written by a marketing firm and scheduled it through TweetDeck. Is that a bot?

Edit: Or every newspaper is basically auto-posting their recent articles, some even just doing it like an RSS feed, where it tweets a link and headline whenever an article is posted. Is that a bot?

Absolutely, yes to all of that.

(Off topic, but I love the juxtaposition of your handle and the topic being discussed. :) )

> corporations are people too, my friends. But they are very strange kinds of people.

It has been said elsewhere that corporations are a sort of amoral artificial intelligence. The trouble is that they are more powerful than a human citizen, while having none of the community or political interests of a human citizen.

The bigger one is the lack of any consequences whatsoever. For instance, do something that leads to the death of another person, even unintentionally, and you may find yourself behind bars for some significant period of time. Do it as a corporation, even on a large scale, and you'll generally suffer little more than a fine that is generally no more than a few days of yearly revenue, and of course zero consequences for the executives who in many cases are directly culpable - frequently making decisions consciously prioritizing short-term profit over all, including safety. Boeing being the contemporary poster child.

> every now and then I check what some elected Canadian politicians have tweeted recently

there's yer problem, eh?

In recent years we've seen what it's like when politicians stop being boring on Twitter.

There are worse things in life than polite artifice. Maintaining it is, itself, an achievement.

What about people who use the API for accessibility reasons because the official app isn't compatible with their needs?

When I used twitter a decade ago, I used TweetDeck, which used the API to post to twitter for me. So that would label me as a Bot just because I like a better UX/UI.

That’s a trivial problem to solve.

So trivial that nobody has ever solved it at scale.

If there's a flow that a human can go through to oauth with an application, then there's a way to bypass that same flow through a bot.

How is that not a problem for the official interface then?

well, it is. so the problem is the quest to get rid of bots.

Let me solve it as a technical person. Whether management wants it or not is not my forte.

You want an API because other apps are better. Let those apps partner with Twitter to allow only humans and not a second order API. If they do that, they get kicked out faster than Fortnite got kicked out. Both Twitter and the API user need to own the relationship and guarantee its sanctity so it will likely require an investment bigger than $99 to be paid by the API user (app) to Twitter.

So you will not have infinite API apps, just a few of them, those who can pay the cost of providing and validating the API.

> You want an API because other apps are better. Let those apps partner with Twitter to allow only humans and not a second order API

I want to write a blog engine that posts a summary and a link to my twitter timeline automatically.

Do I have to "partner with Twitter"? How will that look?

No problem with such account being marked as Bot, right?

Twitter owns TweetDeck now, so that wouldnt be the case today

Telegram does something like this.

But it also allows (even encourages) third party clients, which can act on behalf of ordinary users.

Good example:

AwareOps tweets every time a solution goes down: https://twitter.com/awareops

Is that spamming bot stuff or useful or both?

How about the kid who wrote an app that tweets everyone position of a billionaire's airplane location?

That's the point.

> but if you tweet through the API then you get a big "BOT" tag next to your username on the feed.

What if I do this through Zapier? What about Hootsuite? Who's a BOT and who isn't?

How about we just print capital letter the "BOT" on automated accounts? And then just add a optional filter for comments/likes/shares?

That’s not the bot issue everyone is talking about. It’s bunch of fake/empty accounts posting/replying something what pushes some fakenews, propoganda, etc.

It has been especially noticeable this year, since February 24th

Musk hates bots mainly because of all the єɭ๏ภ ๓ยรк wants to give you free money scams. That isn't really caused by the API

The 'bots on Twitter' thing is perhaps one of the few things I agree with Musk about. Searching a hashtag like #javascript or #webdev or similar reveals a whole universe of obviously low quality content posting bots getting suspiciously the same number of likes and retweets on every post. Things like "Top 10 Web Languages You Need To Know" and the list is just randomly shuffled with link shorteners everywhere. This stuff is definitely polluting whatever sacred public square Musk seems to think Twitter needs to be. Obviously bots and spam is a monumental problem that transcends Twitter.

They added this a year ago:

https://blog.twitter.com/common-thread/en/topics/stories/202...

I have not seen many obvious bot accounts using it, even the “good” ones.

They should try to detect bots not using the API and ban them.

IMO all modern freedom of speech issues stem from not being able to differentiate between humans and bots. And it may be the case that it's not a solvable problem and we should assume any sentiment expressed online is always just noise.

> the problem is the lack of differentiation between bots and real accounts

Nah, I'd bet that it really is as simple as the fact that the first thing Elon sees under any and everything he tweets is a flood of cryptobot fake posts and scams. That he and we identify them quite easily, and he's just flat-out tired of it.

If clamping down on API access also curtails a significant proportion of those posts, then he'll do it, even if it's just a temporary relief.

I agree this is what his issue is likely to be.

I'd be pretty surprised if those accounts were obviously using the API, too easy to ban them by application.

half of what I tweet could be done by a bot, that is to say answer to writerslift posts with links to books and articles. the other half could not. I'm currently real, but would I be a bot if I automate my bot half?

>The problem isn't the bots,

I would see bots as a major concern if you want to monetize the platform.

this is brilliant

That already exists (see e.g. that celebrity jet tracker) but I've never found out how to get that label.

Part of his pitch during the acquisition was charging for embeds, so I would not be making any bets on the API loosening up

That would be awesome. Maybe sites will stop using them and take screenshots instead.

> Maybe sites will stop using them

Yeah, good luck getting someone like the BBC to pay for embedding tweets.

> and take screenshots instead.

I'd assume that would be against TOS (probably is already.)

I can’t imagine a screenshot of a tweet would be anything but fair use, or stoppable. Worse case, the BBC takes a screenshot of another screenshot?

Accessing tweets does not seem to require agreeing to any Twitter TOS. They have the option to not serve data to your client (browser), but once they've chosen to, there doesn't seem to be any agreement that would restrict your right to screenshot. Republishing those screenshots could run afoul of copyright restrictions, but no more so than embedding currently does.

I've never seen TOS that don't state you agree to them by using the service...

You can visit Twitter (logged out) and see tweets without ever having agreed to or being shown the TOS. After viewing 5 or so they put up a big "Please Register" popup that cannot be closed, but if you clear your cookies you're good again.

Go to a direct link to a tweet from an anonymous browser.

Until a court case says that the act of receiving bytes from an HTTP server constitutes agreement to a contract that was never even presented to you, it's hard to see how you can possibly have agreed to a TOS. The user must be presented with a TOS and have the option to reject it in order to have agreed to it.

You agree to using the TOS by accessing the service, have you seen a case not enforcing that paradigm?

In Specht v. Netscape, the court declined to hold Netscape’s browsewrap (i.e. "putting a link to the ToS somewhere in the web page") enforceable because the hyperlink’s placement at the bottom of the screen failed to put users on notice of Netscape’s terms.

In Hines v. Overstock.com, the court found Overstock.com’s browsewrap unenforceable because the website failed to prominently display the link to the online agreement in a way that would put users on notice of the website’s terms and conditions.

And if you think it's all because "you have to scroll to see the hyperlink" and that Twitter's one is valid because there's always a "Terms and Services" hyperlink in small text on the screen at all times, I can tell you of Nguyen v. Barnes & Noble, in which the court held that Barnes & Noble’s browsewrap was unenforceable despite the fact that the hyperlink was prominently placed next to the buttons users must click in order to complete online purchases.

Van Tassell v. United Marketing Group also states:

> Because no affirmative action is required by the website user to agree to the terms of a contract other than his or her use of the website, the determination of the validity of a browsewrap contract depends on whether the user has actual or constructive knowledge of a website's terms and conditions.

In other words, w.r.t. the enforceability of Twitter's ToS on users that have never agreed to it explicitly, they have the burden of proof and have to give the court convincing proof that you knew about their ToS when you broke it.

This is all based on a rather obvious common law standard:

> An offeree, regardless of apparent manifestation of his consent, is not bound by inconspicuous contractual provisions of which he is unaware, contained in a document whose contractual nature is not obvious. - Specht v. Netscape

So yes, I have seen cases not enforcing this paradigm.

Sources:

Specht v. Netscape: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=958708515918483...

Hines v. Overstock.com: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=163224540731670...

Nguyen v. Barnes & Noble: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=110038111392175...

Van Tassell v. United Marketing Group: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=174994243217056...

Generally all ToS and EULA that do not require an action of explicit consent (an "Agree" button or checkbox, not checked by default) are not enforceable. This is well established case law.

But the BBC has a Twitter account and has accepted the ToS.

> Republishing those screenshots could run afoul of copyright restrictions, but no more so than embedding currently does.

Embedding should be fine because that's being "published" by Twitter who you have already given permission to publish (cf [1]) although I'd have thought (IANAL) that a screenshot would be a good example of "fair use for commentary" except when e.g. news services embed tweets, they're often not commenting on those tweets specifically, just giving a general flavour of sentiment.

It's a minefield, probably.

[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jwherrman/want-to-publi...

Lots of ppl already do this on twitter itself - instead of quoting or replying, they'll screenshot another tweet and embed it. I suspect they're trying to defend against the tweet being deleted, but they've just opened up a whole new front of potential abuse - I treat all such fake embeds as suspicious, and I would if they were published on a website too.

It's also partially to avoid boosting the screenshotted content, if you want to for example call something out as being bad or false. I do agree it makes it harder to spot fakes

I wonder if this was part of the whole media / video embeds - so a musician could release music and news websites etc would pay for the embeds. Musicians could then get a cut of that money - or a cut of the advertising of it.

Maybe pay for no ads in the embeds?

The only thing that can stop a bad guy with an API (besides policy and moderation) is a good guy with an API. Some of the very best misinfo research and tooling came from academics having access to firehose data.

IMO framing it as "get rid of the bots" is the wrong way to solve the problem because it's unsolvable, especially as we head more towards a world of content being generated by increasingly sophisticated ML algorithms.

It's probably best to embrace the bots and instead think about it as a problem of categorizing, quantifying, and applying more metadata to messages that let people, agents, or other bots determine the qualities about the information that they want to know.

100%. Allow open, reasonably rats-limited access to the API, and use the absolutely gargantuan amounts of data Twitter has built up to sort through bots. If other services can do it why can’t Twitter?

Who says other services have. Any examples here on your part?

> IMO framing it as "get rid of the bots" is the wrong way to solve the problem because it's unsolvable,

I think it's super simple actually. Wanna get a blue check-mark to prove you are human? Here, pay us 10$ pledge. You'll lose it, if you break the "rulez". Add financial frictions to the game, and bots strategy won't scale...

Elon only mentioned the bot 'problem' to get out of the deal.

He shut up about the bots as soon as it was evident the excuse wasn't working. Bots are of no concern otherwise.

With free API, third party providers can fill the gap with bad spam moderation Twitter could never figure out themselves.

Instead of trying to maximize in-house value open ecosystem works better for Twitter.

Lots of the “bots” are people. The solution is to show high quality content and suppress low quality content, regardless of input.

One persons high quality content is another person's trash.

Sure but when twitter users complain about bots they are complaining about content quality, not keyboard input methods.

I get that bots are a thing, but also Twitter's API doesn't serve ads, which is its primary source of revenue?

...ads, which is its primary source of revenue?

That is what should change. The largest twit accounts, whether they use API or not, should be charged directly by twitter for the value of reaching their many followers. Twitter the firm is infamously bad at improving anything, but this would be a way of recruiting a variety of capable parties into important efforts like fighting bots, spam, harassment, etc. Also there would be lots of money. This was obvious ten years ago.

> > ..ads, which is its primary source of revenue?

> The largest twit accounts, whether they use API or not, should be charged directly by twitter for the value of reaching their many followers

Paid reach is still ads, and narrowing free organic reach so that only the ads people are willing to pay for broad reach for have broad seeming-organic reach drops perceived content quality for consumers directly and reduces the perceived upside for the people creating and developing reach for organic content, getting them to put less effort in on your platform, further reducing consumer-perceived content quality.

Tweets by e.g. Kim Kardashian extolling the virtues of particular beauty products are certainly advertisements, but they function differently and they aren't received as such by many of her followers. AFAICT Kardashian isn't really paying twitter for these tweets? That seems like an ongoing error on twitter's behalf.

Granted, insta posts are probably more valuable for Kardashian, but there are lots of other parties who would also pay twitter for the privilege of tweeting.

> but there are lots of other parties who would also pay twitter for the privilege of tweeting.

In the short term, yes. But when you make paying the only way to get significant reach, you reduxe the quantity of presented-as-organic content that feels organic rather than like ads, which both directly removes the perception advantage of pay-for-“organic”-reach vs. pay-for-adds and also makes the whole platform less attractive to consumers, costing eyeballs, and making it harder to sell either traditional ads or ads in the form of paid “organic” reach.

Organic content that reachers passive/relatively inactive consumers is where your audience comes from. Make people pay to supply that, and you lose the audience you are selling to them and to traditional advertisers.

This argument feels theoretical. Twitter is not just an ad network. It offers unique values to its users. It is already conveying lots of promotional crap from big users to their followers, which doesn't have to change. Both sides of that transaction choose to take part in it. No normal ad network can deliver that value.

If twitter starts charging the followers, sure, that will be a big mistake. I'm not suggesting that. Twitter should start charging the followed, only a little at first, on a sliding scale. They should try different pricing policies, for different users, and should keep adjusting until they have extracted a great deal of money from those twitter users with the most followers. It could be that some highly-followed users don't themselves see much value from their own tweets, so they won't want to pay. Twitter doesn't need those users; they're wasting resources. You may be worried about chasing away small users who will grow into big users, but small users won't be charged. By the time they're big, they will value the relationships they've built with their followers.

A generic social media firm couldn't do this, but twitter is in a unique position.

> This argument feels theoretical.

So does your argument.

> Twitter is not just an ad network. It offers unique values to its users.

Yes, it does, and that unique value is noncommercial organic content, which charging for organic reach undercuts.

> If twitter starts charging the followers, sure, that will be a big mistake. I'm not suggesting that.

No, you are suggesting something just as bad: charging people for exactly what gives the followers a reason to be there.

> If twitter starts charging the followers, sure, that will be a big mistake. I'm not suggesting that.

They are producing and providing Twitter with content which people are coming to Twitter to consume. That’s not “wasting resources”, that’s what enables Twitter to sell space to advertisers.

> By the time they're big, they will value the relationships they've built with their followers.

By the time they are even moderate-sized, they’ll be on multiple social platforms, be using each of them (among other things) to inform their followers of the others, and the kind of content they are distributing on them (especially as it changes), and will be, themselves, cobtinuously reevaluating the cost/benefit of each platform for particular content and adjusting their social media strategy.

Facebook uses this strategy, and as they dialed it up, big accounts did direct followers to other platforms to get reliable access to what they were producing.

> A generic social media firm couldn't do this, but twitter is in a unique position.

How? Literally everything you’ve said applies to any large social media platform the same way as it applies to Twitter.

If this [0] is "noncommercial organic content", I quit. It feels like you have a commitment to the abusive unprofitable way that twitter has been managed for at least a decade. I can't imagine why.

[0] https://twitter.com/KimKardashian/status/1586430799884140545

Wait you mean those "checkmarks" are free?

I know, right? It seems so dumb that it's hard to believe. They're free to the right sort of people:

Applicants need to be notable in fields such as government, entertainment, sports or political activism, and they need to abide by Twitter's rules including a ban on the glorification of violence. [0]

Which probably means one can get a checkmark if one pays the right PR firm, who kick back to the right twitter middle manager, but twitter shareholders don't get a cut. Twitter has completely ignored an obvious source of revenue for its entire existence.

[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/twitter-verificati...

My little side project is a terribly written bot that brings some joy to a niche group. I hope I don’t get excluded. It’s also brought me a lot of joy along with everything I’ve learned building it. There are a lot of automated accounts that are really interesting. Twitter is worse off right now - and people/communities hate uncertainty. Signed -@BostonTimelaps1

If he does find the bot accounts significant enough to identify that he has been "duped" is there any recourse? I suspect this might be the canary in the mine (of social-media businesses) and Elon is passionate enough to release said numbers which could be used as a litmus for all business that marketed 'number of "users"' as something of a validator.

The majority of scams are not bots written with the API. They’re stollen accounts of real people that are semi-automated, semi mech turked using a variety of techniques.

That is like killing all the mongoose since no one dies of snakebites anymore

As a developer, not really a tweeter, I'd be super-happy if a read-only API was opened up again. It was a gold mine when it came to creating cool things back in the days, especially analysis stuff.

No thanks don't want another Cambridge Analytica on our hands.

Yet those types of organizations are already scraping this data behind the scenes. Twitter’s API restrictions hurt well intentioned actors.

Do you think CA (and others) are restricted by API or non-API? A missing API hurts developers the most, not huge companies who can access the data either way.

Does he really hate bots, or was it just something he came up with to try to get out of buying it?

My guess is he wanted to lower the price... He's friend with Jack Dorsey, who said the bot problem is worse than Twitter is admitting. And nobody want's a social media platform discussion is ran by sucky AI.

I think you hugely over-estimate the importance of “developer APIs” to the number of bots on twitter.

You’re never going to really fully defeat browser automation or HTTP request playback with automatically generated payloads. No one technically needs an API if a web interface exists to automate something. It’s easier with an official API sure, but not super hard without.

Indeed, a truly malicious bot farm would avoid the API altogether and just fake web client requests to look as much like the real thing as possible. Anyone can capture the HTTP messages with just a computer and an open source MITM proxy to decrypt and inspect the SSL message contents for recreating in a bot script or application.

How about making changes to the interface html structure/ids and same for the api. Will break any program using it, but won't bother users. Now record what accounts are silenced by that, do it multiples times and ypu have an idea who is a bot ?

If a screen reader can navigate it, a bot can do it too. And they must comply with accessibility regulations.

> browser automation

Labor is cheap depending on where you go.

> He really hates the bots, so he'll probably close up the API.

That term bot conflates at least three distinct meanings. Not sure how blocking the API would affect #2 or #3

1) Automated accounts probably using the API that are run by a program to post content. Can be benign. Here's an example:

https://twitter.com/happyautomata/

2) Large accounts that push a particular point of view, often state sponsored, run in teams. Does not need an API. Here's an example:

https://twitter.com/sprintermonitor

3) Small accounts paid to push or disrupt a particular agenda in replies. Often state sponsored. Example I suspect:

https://twitter.com/DaBoy1804/with_replies

> He really hates the bots, so he'll probably close up the API.

How relevant is the API though?

Is it possible to put together a Selenium script that posts a tweet?

Might require changing some parameters of the browser / tweaking it a little or getting an older version, because nowadays browsers have a flag that says "hey, I'm being automated!" But other than that, I don't see how they could prevent it

If they think keeping the API closed down or closing it down even more, is an effective defence against the bots… They need a quick refresher course in why the Analog Hole makes perfect DRM impossible outside of completely controlled circumstances.

Even if you required a dedicated twitter device per account, and no api at all… no more twitter website even or read only website … then you would get people building robots to touch the screen as fast as possible to “physically automate “ the devices… if you limit that device to only having one account associated with it, you would need a way to deauthorise a device for when you sell it or upgrade to a new one, so they would just automate the deauthorise workflows and “load balance” across any necessary size pool of devices.

Any efforts like this will drastically increase user friction and drive away customers/users. Simultaneously as far as they go down this path there will be (as long as twitter is still considered relevant, at least) … be state funded propaganda organisations who’s interests align with funding such a device farm, and simultaneously they would want deniability so the operators of such twitter device farms would wind up in the sort of ethically dubious zone as companies like Pegasus group (examples because its after midnight and I don’t feel like looking up exact details, consider these hypothetical examples unless they are correct) selling their hardware to “legitimate governments” to perform a once off inspection of the phone data of someone crossing the border into the USA at JFK airport in New York, and also to counties like Saudi Arabia to hack and monitor dissidents round the clock by installing root kits/exploits.

Effectively there’s no point, they should open up the api and monitor it better.

> * High def video

Maybe as a paid/subscriber feature; even YouTube seems to have a cost problem with high def video. Video ads are barely profitable, I can't imagine serving high quality video content at a loss being a good business decision.

> * Focus on music publication

I think this is a niche that Twitter currently excels at. The music industry constantly has small announcements which is well suited for Twitter's format. Should be fairly easy to add a high quality music player, and that should also save a bit on bandwidth costs since musicians currently upload a video just to play music.

Plus, if you look at musician profiles, many pay for a linktree-like service since Twitter only supports one profile link; they can easily capture much of that business for themselves.

Funnily enough, this is what MySpace tried to pivot to be. Every music brand wants to have some sort of home page they can use for advertising/promoting and communications. Difference is Twitter currently has a critical mass of musicians.

> * Removal of twitter blue but some kind of subscriptions to edit tweets

Just charge for verification. They can even be cute and make different kind of verification checkboxes with additional information like they currently do for politicians (maybe even charge the politicians). Easy ones off the top of my head: business owner with business info, musicians, brands.

> * Paid push DMs to followers (e.g. follow this account for drops, then the tweeter has to pay to tweet to this group)

They kinda did this the other way around, OnlyFans style, which makes sense since there's more people consuming tweet than notable people making tweets. Users can pay/subscribe to get noticed by the tweeter. I believe Instagram also recently launched a similar feature. There's a lot of value in having an OnlyFans feature set without the pornographic association. Or Patreon but with a massive userbase.

I really like your industry/user-type approach.

In the Fintweet community the wish list is probably something like:

* Ban all spam bots

* Ban all spam bots (it's that bad)

* Ability to edit tweets

* Maybe a slightly better to tack tickers. Currently you'll do something like $META but this gets problematic when there are dual-listings, or the same ticker in different markets.

* Have URLs not count towards character limit

A lot of Twitter spam can easily be combated with more options under "who can reply/retweet", such as: only paid Twitter Blue subscribers, only followers, only verified users (especially with more ways to get verification), only users with verified phone numbers, etc.

Right now tweets are either completely public, completely private, or close-friends-only. If Twitter wants to easily solve the moderation problem; let people have moderation tools over replies to their tweets.

Then allow those restrictions as filters on the timeline, who can follow, who can DM, or as visibility for their own tweets, which can probably also be paid features.

> They need to re-free up the API.

it's not easy to regain that trust once you lose it. how long would Twitter's API need to remain open until you decide they're not going to reverse course and that it's worth building on? 2 years, minimum? and even then there'd be a bitter taste when i do: it would always be in the back of my mind that "what i'm building is only temporary, they're going to take this away again at _some_ point".

I get the point, but don't you have it in the back of your mind when using any 3rd party service? I do.

Don’t worry, there’s an unlimited supply of younger, less jaded devs willing to do the work.

Even though all the top leadership was fired and swapped for new people?

A new owner who was forced to complete the purchase by a court order. He'll dump it as soon as there's a good price for it.

He didn't want to buy it at that price when the market price had dropped by 2/3 or more. Doesn't mean he didn't still want to own it. Don't think he's buying it because he wants more money, it's not a good way to make more money.

> High def video

Twitter's video serving is embarrassingly woefully bad. Like really, really bad. So much so that Twitter videos buffering is a meme. This should be a core focus.

> They need to re-free up the API

Nobody cares about that. I mean a few developers do but 99.9% of users don't. Nor do they care about the consequences. Time and time again we've seen a growing platform embrace developers until they're large enough not to want to deal with it anymore. This is Lucy and the football at this point. When will we learn?

> They need to do this for goodwill at the very least.

Again, nobody cares about this issue, just like nobody cares about "free speech". They care about not being silenced for their particular positions. Elon's Twitter will reflect this and Elon is very much a conservative (in the US sense).

It's why you only ever hear about "free speech" when it comes to hate speech and never, say, to Palestinians getting silenced on Twitter [1].

[1]: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/5/13/social-media-co...

> Twitter's video serving is embarrassingly woefully bad

I've never understood why they just refuse to let you click a button to view the higher res version of a video. Instead, it's a game of refreshing and clicking play several times until whatever automation they have realizes that you do, in fact, have enough bandwidth and decoding power to handle a 640p video.

At least youtube-dl bypasses Twitter's shenanigans, but it just seems like such a hostile feature to begin with.

His other venture, Tesla, is famously hostile to repairmen and closed up. I doubt it. Not his MO.

There's an officially-unofficial API for your Tesla: https://www.teslaapi.io/

It's been the de facto Tesla API for 3rd party devs for a number of years now, and Tesla seems to be perfectly fine with it existing.

I loved the free twitter API! So much interesting data to play with, was really sad when they closed it up.

I think the ship has sailed on the API. It was a different time, and the people that used Twitter's API to do fun things didn't just give up...they migrated to mastodon and discord. I don't think the golden years of twitter are coming back.

Like 5 people "migrated" to Mastodon, and Discord isn't a comparable product

Discord is a very different product but the demographics of users are very much those that have migrated from hackers on twitter to being in discord groups as of today.

As much as I wish FOSS could conquer all, honestly the number of users on twitter alone would convince a lot of people to migrate back

Twitter should remove Communities, Lists, Professional Profiles, Long Notes (their new take on blogging smh) and Spaces (you know that audio thing)?. These are failed experiments no?

Twitter should improve Bookmarks. I bookmark a lot of Tweets since it was introduced to the public and scrolling down for hundreds of tweets is not fun.

Even moving the bookmark function out of the 'share' menu would be a nice improvement!

With regards to the API, they shut it down because there were people building apps with the stated intention of taking users from twitter and building their own platform.

I’m on my phone and don’t have a source handy, but it was a serious enough concern to force Twitter to do what they did to the API!

If that is a real concern, how come Wikipedia isn't susceptible to it?

Because the Wikipedia community can't be replicated.

In addition to opening the API, it would be cool if twitter became interoperable with ActivityPub. It would be one of the biggest instances and still attract a lot of people. It would be cool but I don't think it will ever happen, sadly.

Yes like GNIP around that time these firehose startups were amazing and it was a golden age of metadata and then Twitter Killed the Golden Goose. Bring back open data! Let Open Source and all the hackers from second order efforts give back value to Twitter's Value.

Sounds like you think he will move in exactly the same direction as all the other social media platforms. He has to make the platform unique in a way that will be difficult for competitors to simply imitate. Or preferably in a direction where there are no competitors at all.

This was stock market crack when they first did it

yes, but it probably won't be free

Can they run twitter on starlink sats?

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