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Comment by hoshi73 | Hacker News Reader

It's insane that their sign-up process now requires a phone number to complete on the web, and even basic features like playing a video in a tweet recently stopped working on x.com without an account. (In the past, searching for tweets, looking at an account's entire timeline, etc., never required logging in at all.)

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So where are the alternative instances popping up left and right? I thought the internet would detect a problem and route around it.

It's not insane if you're trying to build a social network without bots and foreign interference.

But Twitter has and embraces that. The bots are all verified. Go on any tweet that mentions crypto or "my friends account got hacked" and dive into the deep well of hidden tweets.

Hiding tweets for users without accounts does absolutely nothing for either of those goals.

X.com makes it nearly impossible to run bot accounts, with its phone number per account requirement, and the astronomical fees for using its API.

Twitter, by comparison, was trivially easy to run bots on. I ran many automated Twitter accounts (for legit purposes). I had to shut them all down when Musk bought Twitter.

That's just a lie. Twitter has been overrun by "verified" African-Middle Eastern spambots posting completely nonsensical spams since AFTER it was bought. It's clearly connected to someone higher up than its head of products, considering said head of products was forced to rollback an anti-spam measure at least once.

Just Google « buy x.com retweets » or similar and you will see a dozen company offering their services. Doesn’t look like a lack of activity on that area

X has substantially fewer bots than the old Twitter. Heck, my past employer had a private API access to create unlimited number of accounts via a basic POST request.

I mean, yeah, that’s a very very low bar to be honest.

Though I believe the ratio of bot traffic is higher than it was before

It is important to remember that combatting bots isn't a binary state. Every effort to reduce bots results in a linear reduction in the proportion of bots, but never a complete eradication. There will always be people who are sufficiently motivated to spend the time and money and effort to overcome the safeguards.

I agree with the user above. It is infinitely harder how to run bots on X than it was on Twitter.

But X (formerly twitter) made it way easier for a bot account to appear legit. And the general user experience is still full of bot content. I don’t think it actually matters much if the barrier of entry is a bit more difficult to pass, but once in you have a verified checkmark + can act freely. Whatever they are doing, the result isn’t better than it was before

But there are still very many automated accounts. Publicly automated, secretly automated, blatantly automated, not-hidden-but-not-advertised-to-be automated. What caused you to have to shut down when so few others, legitimate, illegitimate, and just regular old gimmicks had to?

funny, I am not surprised that it is now much harder to run an automated twitter account for legitimate purposes. Running one for illegitimate purposes on the other hand....

Twitter's removal of messages based on foreign government requests went up massively after the Musk takeover.

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