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Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

I mean what do you want them to actually do instead? Like seriously I’ve implemented at a company I worked for and it’s the least invasive thing to actually rate limit people.

Alternatives included:

- pay a small fee but that requires a credit card

  - send us government documents which is worse

  - mine crypto for a while but it doesn’t stop people who are actually motivated

  - send a selfie and then do some face matching, also worse.

Like what other things can we ask for that actually work and aren’t more invasive?

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I just want to be able to occasionally read a few tweets with no required login or account. Just the same with Instagram and similar, I just won't use it and I'll forget about it. I guess Twitter is next. No, I've never had a Twitter account. I don't have a Facebook account.

I don't think Twitter cares that you won't use it. They've almost certainly weighed the cost of a tiny portion of people caring vs a massive reduction in bots.

The rule of thumb is that 99% of users are lurkers. Since more and more people are privacy focused and it's clear that forcing lurker to register is not in their best interest they obviously miscalculated.

Reddit, Qora and Pinterest all tried it, shot themselves in the foot, lost a huge readership and reversed it or will reverse it.

It's hard to realise how bad it is as only lurker don't have a sunk cost fallacy and easily quit and their quitting is invisible.

How do you make that kind of calculus though? Presumably Twitter will want to stay around for a very long time. If people like BTCOG take away a negative experience from it then doesn't it seed a future negative opinion of Twitter?

10 years ago when a government banned Twitter it was almost universally seen as bad. That's probably not the case anymore. Will it be worse in the future?

>They've almost certainly weighed the cost of a tiny portion of people caring vs a massive reduction in bots.

I'm sure they have. And I, being used to being in the minority of users, will likely find some 3rd party solution around the problem they created. Win-win outside of me wasting a few minutes installing another extension.

>I mean what do you want them to actually do instead?

Nothing. Hire more moderators maybe. it also looks dishonest to frame it this way when twitter asks these pii for "spam protection" and yet still can't ban obvious Fiverr-like spam accounts

> Like what other things can we ask for that actually work and aren’t more invasive?

Nothing, somehow plenty of websites do fine without even asking for email, including this one. It seems what you really want to say is "What can we ask from you for it not to cost us anything?".

Obvious to a human manually looking at the account isn't obvious to a computer system that has to pick them out a huge dataset. You will never be able to ban Fiverr type accounts because for the same reason residential VPNs work well. You're paying someone who has a clean record and will send all the right signals.

HN works because it's niche. It can be moderated by a handful of people. Once you cross the "can't be moderated by humans" threshold of size you're solving a completely different problem.

I won't knock you for saying "well then you shouldn't exist at that scale" but that's a non-answer for the real world where giving up PII in exchange for participating in a huge social network is a trade enough people are willing to make that you feel pressure to do it in order to get in.

> someone who has a clean record

It doesn't follow to me, those people open thousands of account for those scams, how are they clean? They are not sophisticated, they don't even use them like real humans and it's literally for $5!

> "can't be moderated by humans" threshold

Is it a threshold or simply a cost center that starts to be big and needs to be slashed in order to please shareholders?

To me it's perfectly possible to be big and have moderators, you just can't have it cheaply.

They've already rejected doing nothing, as it doesn't work.

I want Tesla to give me a free car too, but it ain't happening. At some point a company makes decisions you aren't gonna agree with and your only recourse is to not use them. If that means you can't read Twitter, then that's the price you pay. You aren't "owed" a free Twitter account solely on your own personal terms.

No one's asking for a free car.

They're asking for a stop to major companies lying to the public. To stop harvesting people's data under false pretenses.

I think citizens can and should demand those things from companies that choose to incorporate in their country. That avail themselves of the legal systems and protections. That take advantage of the workforce present.

Companies are free to choose where they operate and incorporate.

Yet customers love free stuff, aslong as they can send cat pictures they dont care.

> You aren't "owed" a free Twitter account solely on your own personal terms.

It's funny that all those companies are trying to get so big and so central to our lives, to the point many news (including from police precincts or first responders) are only posted on twitter or fb, yet when you point out they shouldn't ask you a phone number to access them it's "they owe you nothing".

If they have a monopoly on the public square, arguments could be made...

There should not be a channel for government communications that is only available upon giving money or information to a private party.

(But that's a ship that sailed long before the internet age. "Want to know the laws? Pay up!")

talk to your electeds about regulation then.

Public sector and publicly funded groups should be communicating through standards-based channels. Their content belongs to the digital commons. This exists today, via the ActivityPub and RSS sphere of ecosystems.

... to break them up?

Play nicer as a start.

But you can’t blame that on Twitter, no matter how much they welcome it and how evil they are. Blame it on unspeakably bad judgement on the part of government employees. Making Twitter the conduit for official communications? I can’t even fathom the mindset.

First they came...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...

> You aren't "owed" a free Twitter account solely on your own personal terms.

If we go that route of argumentation: Can Twitter please close shop and go away then? Their value is vastly overestimated: Most people don't want to use Twitter specifically, they are peer pressured into it because it is where everyone is. There are better free and open source alternatives without them trying to steal from me. Twitter burns all that money (do they generate a profit yet?) to stay on top, just so that nobody else can.

To stay with your analogy: Tesla rolled up and pushed every other car manufacturer out, now they are giving a somewhat free car and in return they want you to do everything they say, and the keys to your house "just in case".

We don't owe Twitter anything.

>You aren't "owed" a free Twitter account

no you see, that's the problem. I don't WANT a twitter account, but I apparently need to use the site to view local updates in my town.

I'm perfectly happy continuing to not post there. I just don't see the benefit in making me find an extension around this annoyance so I can continue to not have a twitter account.

Twitter is stopping viewing, which isn't a fraud / abuse issue at low rates.

In the case of posting, rate limiting / scoring w/o a phone number without explicitly banning until you build more reputation works pretty well from what I can see, and most legit twitter users, especially new ones, don't post a lot and mostly read anyway.

And in twitter's case, I think paying a small amount of crypto would actually be something the CEO is interested in this case for the private types who won't / can't get a phone number. Some of twitter best accounts are anonymous and the CEO is into crypto. Add a monero payment option for those small amounts who aren't fraudulent and are private people and you will probably get rid of a lot of complaints.

Personally I'm a fan of the fee idea. You can quickly outstrip the yearly revenue per user with even a small fee, and the fee payment could e.g. happen via PayPal which doesn't require credit cards, to give one example. The issue with fees though is that you might need a billable address for tax purposes which renders this entire exercise pointless.

> The issue with fees though is that you might need a billable address for tax purposes.

Maybe there is room for some simple innovation here. Is it possible to do “coarse” address for tax purposes? After all I imagine they only care about which tax jurisdiction such as county / parish or something like that?

I don’t understand that in this context.

Let’s say you pay a fee for being able to view tweets without logging in. How will they know it’s you who’s trying to view a tweet if you don’t effectively log in?

MetaFilter's been doing this for decades and it seems to be working well for them

Sure, instead of a phone number you can:

* Give us your Credit Card information

* Give us a picture of your real life self

Neither of these are solutions to the privacy and compromise potential problem that is the 'phone number or else' requirement. Its objectively worse, so that you go "oh, guess you can have my phone number instead".

I want to go further here.

- Combat spam.

- Be large.

- Allow (pseudo-)anonymous accounts.

A social network can only pick two.

> A social network can only pick two.

Reddit has all three (no need for email even), they might not be perfect but I can't remember any time I saw "viagra links" or other obvious spam. They have problems with accounts obviously, but you can't frame it as a spam problem.

I see a lot of spam on Reddit.

That does nothing to speak of “auto moderator”, fragmented rules/guidelines and ilk and the sheer effort involved by volunteers.

Even then: the spam gets through. But I agree that PII is not solving this.

>I see a lot of spam on Reddit.

Where? I've seens a couple of ghost subreddits with spam, but then you see the same with ghost fb groups, weird twitter profiles, youtube, etc On even moderately sized subs I've seen any that wasn't removed quickly by the mods.

People can say mods are too expensive for fb and twitter, but there is the dishonesty, instead of paying mods they pass on that cost to us with our pii while pretending it's free.

uptimeporn, for a very specific example from today. I wont link it because the spam is NSFW and probably removed by now, but- I saw it, so moderation effort is obviously not effective.

Okay, I'll bite.

How does allowing people to read (but not post) without logging in produce "spam"?

There are some attemps to make proof-of-human

https://herrjemand.medium.com/why-cloudflares-captcha-replac...

https://www.proofofhumanity.id/

But in the end it comes to the fact that your Google/Apple needs to have your app store account that is verified to be human enough (less fake accounts) and then a web browser confirms this via a login to this account.

We get into the Ex Machina situation. It was a pretty good movie about Android (robot?} proving itself human.

One option might be to allow people to view tweets if they have accounts from reputable federated identity providers, then you have an identity of an individual person without having to do the validation yourself. You can then rate-limit based on that individual ID.

Another option might be to rate-limit by things which don't require accounts, which won't strictly rate-limit individuals, but it's unlikely that's the terminal goal here. It's not actually clear what they are trying to accomplish. Reducing the amount of resources wasted on scraping bots ?

One option would be to just allow people to view public tweets without requiring sign in.

It doesn't achieve the stated goal of rate-limiting individual people, which sounds like an instrumental goal for an actual (unstated) business objective.

Currently federated identity providers do not provide a separate identity to each site you are authenticated on. At that point any collaborating sites can pull together all the information you give to any one of them. Hell, in most cases your "identity" is your email address, so every site you authenticate with can spam you directly.

"Trust tokens" was built to deal with these issues just for this use case: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/privacy-sandbox/trust-toke...

The Shibboleth Idp also support per SP opaque nameID but nobody like SAML based protocol and as far as I know outside the academical identity federations, no one deploys Shibboleth ...

Shibboleth is terrible -- so terrible it was easier for me to write my own SAML IdP from the specification than try to make it useful. Lots of people use Active Directory Federated Services (ADFS), which has a SAML IdP.

> I mean what do you want them to actually do instead?

I want them to do nothing.

Proton mail requires a small fee which can be paid pseudo-anonymously via cryptocurrency.

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