Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

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I've played devil's advocate elsewhere in the thread, but this is such a petty and irrelevant kerfuffle, as far as Big-Tech-Censorship goes.

By Ben's own description of how the @StratecheryINT account was operated [0] -- i.e. "a new account that has posted a bunch of links (all Stratechery interviews) in a short amount of time, from multiple locations around the world." -- this is exactly the kind of low-hanging fruit that we'd want Twitter spam-detectors to cull with minimal time and resources.

Not only b/c of the obvious spam characteristics, but because it was a days-old account with few (if any) followers/followings. Even if it were a mistake, very little of value has been lost, since every tweet was the result of an automated script (i.e. simple to make a new account, and recreate the content that had thus far zero engagement).

Do people seriously think every such case -- an empty days-old account suddenly doing spam-like activity -- should be manually reviewed? That's a daily waste of human resources for tens of thousands (edit: actually it's millions [1]) of trivial permaban decisions -- exactly the kind of thing that an autoban algorithm can efficiently handle.

> For the rest of us peasants: good luck getting help.

I have the same sentiment, but with a different angle. Verified accounts like Thompson's get a lot of leeway with bending/breaking the rules before facing actual punishment. If a lesser known user deployed a selenium-twitter-spam-bot on AWS, it's possible both their spam bot and their real account would be permanently suspended

[0] https://twitter.com/benthompson/status/1583062865116041229

[1] https://twitter.com/paraga/status/1526237583058952192?ref_sr...

> Do people seriously think every such case -- an empty days-old account suddenly doing spam-like activity -- should be manually reviewed?

The problem is not that the account triggered an algorithmic tripwire, but that the explanatory copy is a customer-hostile lie. It states in no uncertain terms that the suspension was further "carefully reviewed" to be found correct, and is also permanent. Obviously, it wasn't correct, and wasn't permanent.

I strongly suspect that, if there even was a human in the loop as the copy implies, they simply rubber-stamped the algorithmic flag. This is not necessarily the human's fault if their work is monitored/timed.

> The problem is not that the account triggered an algorithmic tripwire, but that the explanatory copy is a customer-hostile lie. It states in no uncertain terms that the suspension was further "carefully reviewed" to be found correct, and is also permanent. Obviously, it wasn't correct, and wasn't permanent.

"Permanently suspended" seems both accurate and helpful -- it doesn't mean that the account can't leave that state, but that unlike most other suspensions, the account will not be unsuspended after a set period of time. The note that Ben posted explicitly says "you can submit an appeal", which would imply to most people the possibility of reversion.

"Permanently suspended" is neither accurate nor helpful. That an account can't leave that state is precisely what "permanently" means. Since an appeal is possible, "Indefinitely suspended" would be accurate.

It doesn't have to be a lot of links, if you piss off the wrong people and they massreport you you're temporarily out.

You can reach out to support, but I don't know that support actually ever responds to any requests. Apparently according to posts on reddit if you add your number to twitter and something happens you won't even be able to ever remove it. Similarly they have weird intransparent policies regarding what numbers are allowed on twitter.

At the end of the day, most tech giants are unreachable. I hate to be that guy,but in a way it's kind of like the big chinese tech dystopia that all HN so adamantly complain about.

This episode demonstrates the foolishness of Twitter's prospective new owner.

He promises to allow all speech that is legal under the first amendment to the US constitution, while simultaneously eliminating spam.

That's an instant contradiction, of course, because spam is perfectly legal under the US constitution.

And every attempt to eliminate spam and bots, whether human or automated, will necessarily sweep up many non-spam and non-bot accounts as false positives.

>He promises to allow all speech that is legal under the first amendment to the US constitution, while simultaneously eliminating spam.

He's used to making these sorts of promises.

He could change it to a pay-to-play model where the payment is miniscule. It may not eliminate all spam, but I wouldn't be surprised if accounts have to go through a kyc payment mechanism in order to prove their identity.

It would eliminate multiple accounts per user, make all users known for wrongspeak prosecution, and largely cure the spam issue unless you're a well funded organization that can pay poor people to risk getting a lifetime ban to promote your spam.

A pay-per-Tweet scheme would reduce the total number of Tweets by 90% or more. We can all discuss whether that would be net-good or net-bad, but the vast majority of that reduction of speech would come from speech that is legal under the US constitution.

I think he means something like WhatsApp, which was 1 dollar per year in the beginning. But then again their model wouldn't work here either, because you could gift a 1 year membership to someone else. Given how much more valuable those bots are than 1 dollar per year, it would mean nothing to gift it to large amounts of people.

Similarly if you enforce it for everyone to pay for themselves, there would immediately be large parts of the world population that wouldn't be able to pay for it. Note that afford and be able to pay isn't the same thing. Which would turn it into the same western echo chamber they basically want it to be.

"It doesn't have to be a lot of links, if you piss off the wrong people and they massreport you you're temporarily out."

Or permanently. I once responded to an inane Kardashian tweet with a very dry restatement that she got famous for a boring porn tape and a father who got OJ Simpson off of a murder rap.

I was told that was "a threat" and perma-banned. 12 years of an account, spun into the void. I'd be angry but it's more embarrassing as an observation.

Twitter supports a usenet-on-acid model of bumrushing fan-bases on one side, and a long tail of bots and noise. It's truly strange how its become what it has.

Wow, who would have thought that you could get banned in multiple ways on twitter? How unfair!

I remember a day when WordPerfect employed thousands of local college students to staff top-notch help lines. They had what at the time was state-of-the-art phone queue management and tried very hard to minimize your wait time. If you needed help adjusting margins or creating footnotes, just call their support and they'll fix you up.

Can you imagine Google answering a phone call or a chat line to explain how to arrange bookmarks in Chrome? Ok, Chrome doesn't cost money, so maybe that's fair. How about Microsoft helping to move the taskbar back to the bottom of the screen? How about Samsung explaining how to set DoNotDisturb? Facebook walking you through how to recover from somebody taking over your account?

Ah, the bad old good old days...

How does banning this account reduce spam?

Removing it from the search results and unlinking its @handle in tweets from other accounts would have been enough, if it was spam, to prevent it from being shown at all to anyone.

If it’s useful for non-spam people who want to follow it from an offsite link, it’ll gain valid followers that can hint towards undoing its shadow ban over a long period of time — and by not doing follow activity of any sort in return, it’s clearly not playing the follow spam game in order to try and mask itself as anything other than a one-way feed account, so there’s no harm in letting active users follow it.

It just reads like Twitter isn’t able to distinguish how it treats RSS feeds from how it treats spambots, due solely to a limited stable of technical reactions.

u/lapcat accurately pointed out to me that a new account rapidly posting links is not likely "spam" by Twitter's definitions [0]. As I said in the reply, Ben hasn't yet posted the list of rules that Twitter says he allegedly broke.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33276718

> Verified accounts like Thompson's get a lot of leeway with bending/breaking the rules before facing actual punishment.

Which rules did he break?

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