
Twitter is finally cracking down on bots - LearnerHerzog
https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/22/twitter-is-finally-cracking-down-on-bots/
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merricksb
Active discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16434875](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16434875)

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ljoshua
That all seems pretty reasonable, mainly geared towards reducing coordinated
amplification of content and not just about taking down bots. The original
Twitter dev post [1] lays it out quite clearly.

I run a single bot for myself [2] that takes the tweets of one (hilarious)
account and either retweets them or slightly modifies the original content and
tweets that out. This seems to fall in line with what Twitter is now
recommending: retweet instead of copy and paste content to multiple accounts,
and do not massively coordinate across many accounts.

[1]:
[https://blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us/topics/tips/2018/au...](https://blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us/topics/tips/2018/automation-
and-the-use-of-multiple-accounts.html)

[2]: [https://github.com/jlyman/CleanIve](https://github.com/jlyman/CleanIve)

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f055
What about social media marketing? Services like buffer and hootsuite, or
enterprise solutions that many tech companies use? Plenty of them have
multiple accounts (like Twitter, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and
more...) and share similar or same tweets among them. It's a very grey area –
if the tweet has different text but the same message, is it ok with the
guidelines or not? Let's take Twitter for example:
[https://twitter.com/TwitterAPI/status/966367370708176897](https://twitter.com/TwitterAPI/status/966367370708176897)
[https://twitter.com/TweetDeck/status/966380629674700800](https://twitter.com/TweetDeck/status/966380629674700800)

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jordigh
I don't know if it will catch on or what will happen to it if it will, but
Mastodon right now is a wonderful place of "censorship" that I'm really
enjoying (@JordiGH@mathstodon.xyz in case anyone wants to say hi). I hope they
also figure out how to censor bots should they ever become a large enough
target to attract them.

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f055
I tried mastodon last year, but the federated timeline is still very random. I
wonder how to find good people to follow :) @f055@mastodon.matrix.org

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jordigh
ohai, I was wondering who you were.

Yeah, the federated timeline is a bit odd. I'm not exactly sure how I got
started, but I did look at the randomness for a bit and started picking up
people that looked interesting, and, ahem, socially networked my way into
their network to find more interesting people to interact with. If they
boosted or talked to someone, I checked out that person to see if they were
someone I would like to interact with too. It also helped to start from an
instance that had a local timeline that I liked. Also, when I noticed someone
was knitting, I asked them about it, and they gave me pointers on the
#mastokal tag to look at, from where I found more knitters and more
interesting people.

It requires a bit more participation than what I understand you can do for
Twitter, which already curates from the beginning a starting point. Now that
I'm done with that bootstrapping, I'm really enjoying the conversations I am
having there.

You might enjoy browsing the #tootorial tag and see if you learn anything,
e.g.
[https://dev.glitch.social/@cassolotl/99520886210579519](https://dev.glitch.social/@cassolotl/99520886210579519)

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dredmorbius
I'd like to know Reddit's plans here, as with manipulation bots.

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cooper12
Considering how much /u/spez loves [0] The_Donald, which is well-known for
using bots [1] as well as breaking other reddit "rules" such as inciting
violence, I doubt much at all.

[0]:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/7a4bjo/time_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/7a4bjo/time_for_my_quarterly_inquisition_reddit_ceo_here/dp708xx/?context=1)

[1]:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/MarchAgainstTrump/comments/69lda5/p...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MarchAgainstTrump/comments/69lda5/proof_the_donald_is_using_bots_and_making_fake/)

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buckthundaz
Seems the time is neigh for Proof of ( human ) Identity.

Something akin with Captchas / Turing tests, but antifragile against
gamification, with requisite incentives, and without adverse surveillance.

