Comment by aquova | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aquova | Hacker News Reader

While I hope this is a step in the right direction, I'm not too wowed by this new policy. The term "good bot" is incredibly vague, and I wasn't able to find a much better definition within the policy change itself. The limitations they want to set on bots aren't too limiting either, basically if you pinky swear to behave, you're a good bot. They mention things like no bulk following or spam posting content, but surely these things could be limited in some way by their API, with whitelisted exemptions for the academic groups they want to target?

I also find fault with this statement from the article:

> Going forward, developers must specify if they’re operating a bot account, what the account is, and who is behind it. This way, explains Twitter, “it’s easier for everyone on Twitter to know what’s a bot – and what’s not.”

It may be known to Twitter who is and isn't a bot, but unless something has changed, there is no public facing way to know if an account is a bot. I have never understood this. Sites like Mastodon and Discord clearly label bot accounts, but Twitter has never done so. They are fine labeling accounts arbitrarily as 'verified', but not clearly identifying bots. This would be a great step forward if they want to redefine bot behavior on the site.

I personally object to these sorts of editorial labels. Bots are operated by humans; these are human accounts. They’re just alts. They should not be treated differently. There’s no such thing as a “bot post”: just human beings using different types of software to author posts.

Literally every single “bot post” was posted by a real person. That person’s posts should not be segregated as a result of their client software.

I will go further. If the thought was orginal and came from the bot we should not treat it's message as second class.

As a person who runs a bot (@sfships) as well as a real Twitter account (@williampietri), I strongly disagree. It's like saying that there's no difference between talking to the store manager and standing next to an in-store TV running a commercial on a loop.

Twitter is mainly about human-to-human connection, and that should be the presumption for any account one comes across. Other uses should be obvious, or at least declared.

> I strongly disagree. It's like saying that there's no difference between talking to the store manager and standing next to an in-store TV running a commercial on a loop.

No. The commercial in a loop is clearly recognized as such. Twitter is more like the difference between talking to the store manager on the phone and talking to a voice script on the phone which claims to be the store manager.

Good luck getting your problem resolved with the voice script. Some voice scripts are good enough that some people can't tell the difference between it. And that's arguably fine! If you can't tell the difference, then is there a problem?

But enter in the poor soul who can't get that voice script to go off script to solve that customer's problem. Or, nefariously, the voice script that can cause problems en masse because there isn't a human in the loop, or even if there is then the human simply doesn't understand that they're causing problems.

I think instead of disambiguating between good and bad bots, they should just allow 'bot accounts' @NAME - bot. If bots want to do their thing, that is fine, and there's certainly a place for bot accounts, it's just when they mascaraed as people.

I'm not sure how you separate them out entirely, I would assume that twitter knows though.

(slightly offtopic, hope you don't mind)

I believe the term is: masquerade.

Though mascaraed is technically correct, it just denotes wearing mascara and not to "mask" oneself as someone else.

I'm fairly sure "mascara" isn't valid as a intransitive verb (transitive would be applying mascara to something), so "when they mascaraed as people" would still be incorrect. Wearing mascara would be "when they were mascaraed as people". (Although it's probably a typo rather than a word choice error, so <shrug>.)

Bots warp a Twitter user's ability to estimate how many human actors are involved in a given interaction. Twitter would like to cut down on astroturfing. One way to do that is to make it significantly harder to automate that process.

These rules make it easier for bot authors who aren't interested in astroturfing to declare themselves as such.

> Bots warp a Twitter user's ability to estimate how many human actors are involved in a given interaction

I think that's a feature, not a bug. Alts and pseudonymous speech are some of the most important speech.

Discord is more of a malware rather than a website.

Ok, but could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN? You've done it repeatedly already, and we're trying for a bit better than that here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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