
Twitter suspended our Open Data project's account and wiped all our followers - edent
http://www.openbenches.org/blog/2018/05/twitter-suspended-our-account-and-wiped-all-our-followers/
======
AlphaWeaver
There's a fair bit of criticism for relying too much on Twitter in this
thread, but I think the article brings up a good point:

>Yes, I know. We should redecentralize and put our content on Mastodon, or the
BlockChain, or some other convoluted platform which has no users. But that’s
just not practical for a small project. We have limited technical resources
and have to go to where the people are.

Despite there being better technical options, those options can't be
considered just on their technical merits... User adoption is also crucial.

~~~
jordigh
User adoption on Mastodon can be pretty big depending on the project. Look at
the number of followers F-Droid has on Mastodon compared to Twitter.

[https://mastodon.technology/@fdroidorg](https://mastodon.technology/@fdroidorg)

[https://twitter.com/fdroidorg](https://twitter.com/fdroidorg)

~~~
stingraycharles
I know of absolutely no people that use Mastadon. There might be a niche
somewhere that uses it, but I can’t help to think that it would hurt rather
than help any hobby project to choose Mastadon over Twitter.

~~~
JasonFruit
I used Mastodon for a while, and it was a pretty good experience. I guess I
just found it wasn't my crowd; every other person with something interesting
to say turned out to be a "demi-girl otherkin fur-friend," or something like
that, and while I am happy for people to have a place to do their thing —
exercise your liberty, fur-friend! — I came to feel a bit out of place. It
seems like its strong secondary focus on trigger warnings and safe spaces
draws too narrow an audience to achieve wide adoption.

~~~
ColinWright
That depends heavily on the instance you choose. There's much, much less of
that on the instance I'm (mainly) on.

And if they're saying interesting things, why do you care if they turn out to
have a different lifestyle from yours?

Pick a different instance and try again.

~~~
JasonFruit
There would probably be instances that I would fit into better, but
discoverability is also a problem. I also had a hard time figuring out how to
make multiple instances visible at once in a single interface, either on
mobile or desktop; I'm not sure if that's even _supposed_ to be possible.

As far as why I care, it's because these interesting people very
understandably want to talk about their lifestyle choices, and I don't really
want to hear about it. (Just like how I'm okay with people smoking in their
homes, but I find their smoke distasteful.) It made the signal-to-noise ratio
for me a little too low for pleasure.

~~~
ColinWright
I'm not sure about having simultaneous visibility of multiple instances, I
just follow the people in whom I'm interested, and their toots turn up in my
instance. That's part of how federation works. Discoverability _is_ a problem,
one that people are working on, but you can find people and follow them, and
then others on that instance over there can be safely ignored.

And if there are people who say really interesting things mixed in with stuff
you don't care about, that's a problem everywhere. There are a few things you
can do. One is that you can use regex's to filter out stuff you're not
interested in. Another is that you can choose to follow only people who _don
't_ talk about the other things, and trust that they will boost the things
that you care about from others.

But it's a social medium, so there will be a mix. You can control it to some
extent, but I've found the tools in Mastodon to be much more powerful than
those in Twitter.

------
_bxg1
A similar thing happened to a much bigger, also innocent, account recently:
[https://kotaku.com/nintendo-fan-account-flagged-on-
twitter-f...](https://kotaku.com/nintendo-fan-account-flagged-on-twitter-for-
image-of-ma-1824999104)

------
ryandrake
I can almost buy the need to have automated account suspensions, but shouldn’t
the appeal at least be human reviewed? When your appeal logic is:

    
    
      if (true) {
        deny_appeal();
      }
    

...it might give people the impression that there’s nobody behind the wheel. I
guess this is what “building services that scale” means.

~~~
ManFromUranus
Twitters bot detection "algorithm" is:

For 1 to accounts do ban account()

A bot will not appeal the ban, while human will appeal!

------
parliament32
An "open data project" that stores all of its data on Twitter? Not that
Twitter's in the right here, but this seems like a bad move...

~~~
edent
We don't. We syndicate to Twitter. That's where we get the most new users.

All the data is on openbenches.org and GitHub.

------
cwmma
I run a bot swarm that tweets transit delays in Boston and this has been
affecting some of the most prolific accounts (i.e. the one that tweets bus
delays), that being said, it's been super easy to get them reactivated and I
havn't lost any followers.

------
modbait
Always figured that you get what you pay for, but in fact,
Twitter/Facebook/Google aren't nearly that reliable in the long term.

~~~
dredmorbius
A remarkably poor hueristic.

Though you _should_ carefully examine just that.

------
enzanki_ars
I would assume Twitter suspended the account due to the rate of posts.
Granted, you are allowed 2400 tweets per day, [1] so the account should not
have had any issues....

[1]: [https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-
limit...](https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-limits)

~~~
peterwwillis
I think the image-post all-caps multi-level text followed by a link with just
a number at the end might have been spammy looking to a crap machine learning
algorithm

~~~
edent
That's possible. We get the text from Google's OCR product - and a lot of
benches are in all caps.

We could try to shift it all to sentence case, but that might lose the meaning
of proper nouns.

Thanks for the suggestion though, that's the first thing which has made sense
about the banning.

------
overcast
I'm saying it again, don't build a business based on someone else's data. At
any point it could disappear, along with you.

~~~
modsec
What's a good alternative you would suggest?

I often have a similar problem and the fact is that most users hang out on
platforms that suck like Twitter, Facebook, etc.

If I build my business on a decentralized platform like blockchain etc. I
immediately lose 90% or even more of my target audience.

If I build my business on my own datacenter the cost and maintenance involved
is staggeringly high.

Do you have a reasonable alternative that would allow small players like us to
host large volumes of data (say about 1 TB to 2 TB) while completely
controlling the ownership of the data?

~~~
iuguy
They had, in their own words hundreds of followers.

At the time of this comment, the fediverse has about 1.2 million accounts.
It's not that hard to get hundreds of followers there.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
Twitter has hundreds of times more accounts. It depends on the audience,
everyone's mileage may vary, so on and so forth, but as a general rule of
thumb, if you're drawing from a pool that's 300x bigger, it's going to be
easier to get orders of magnitude more followers. This is not Mastodon's
fault; network effects are what they are.

Having said that, anecdotally I find it very hard to get people outside of a
relatively narrow demographic to get on board with it. More than one fairly
technically literate friend of mine has stopped about at the point where
they're confronted with the choice of what instance to create an account on,
especially if they choose and then get told "no, that instance is full, go
create one somewhere else." It's not clear that the instance, at least
theoretically, doesn't matter.

Note I say "theoretically," because it turns out it _can_ matter. If the
instance you choose is maintained poorly, your experience may be worse. (This
is in fact my experience.) And it's not clear how to migrate between instances
while keeping your social graph intact. Mastodon has a long way to go in terms
of user experience to be accessible to people who aren't dedicated enough to
the idea of a decentralized Twitter alternative to put up with this stuff.

Last but not least: it's hard for me not to notice that in the year or so I've
had a Mastodon account, it's been _very_ hard for me to discover people to
follow, especially after the occasional burst of new users dies down. The
people I followed are, except for two or three folks who are clearly dedicated
to it over Twitter for philosophical reasons, mostly...just not using it now.
(Of the two dozen people I followed, my timeline is now pretty much just
content from two users, one of who is only "there" because his blog crossposts
automatically.) You know where most of them are still active? Twitter.

tl;dr: it might be great for a project like OpenBench to _also_ be on
Mastodon, but not _exclusively_ be on it.

~~~
iuguy
So to break things down as I think we're partially of the same view:

1\. To start with the end, nobody's suggesting they're exclusively on Mastodon
(which is not the only Fediverse tool, there are others), and they absolutely
should syndicate far and wide. However, posting to Mastodon/Pleroma/Whatever
first and syndicating the content elsewhere means that if this happens again,
they don't lose tweets.

2\. Drawing from a pool 300x bigger doesn't make for 300x better interactions.
Generally Fediverse SNR seems to be better, but this is more or less so
depending upon interest and representation. Bear in mind OP's twitter account
had followers in the hundreds, like my Mastodon account does. I have thousands
on twitter, but I only interact with maybe 50-100 people there.

3\. WRT your friend, there's now
[https://joinmastodon.org/](https://joinmastodon.org/), which will guide them
to an instance. Your friend is not required to use Mastodon to participate in
the Fediverse. There are other tools out there. They're all linked (you can
use Pleroma and read Mastodon toots for example). The whole point of the
fediverse is that it isn't a walled garden and that you own your content.

4\. There are tools to assist with migrating Mastodon accounts but they're
early stage. I agree this sucks, but in it's defence it's because Mastodon is
new and expanding and the tools are improving.

5\. This was the bit I wanted to talk about:

> it's been very hard for me to discover people to follow

Yup. I completely agree. The solution however is right under your nose. The
way to find people to follow in the Fediverse is:

1\. Search for hashtags you're interested in.

2\. Find people using those hashtags and check out their feeds.

3\. Look at who they follow and check those people out.

This is how every social network pretty much used to work, and fundamentally
is down to the fact that in the fediverse you own your presence, your data and
your network which means you are responsible for it. There's nobody pushing
for engagement, nobody making money from filling your feed with ads. The price
is personal responsibility.

If you think that's too high a price to pay, that's fine. Stay in the walled
garden with curated content and risk having all the content you produced for
corporations for free so they could sell ads to be pushed to you and your
friends erased at the drop of a hat without explanation.

And you can say it'll never work, it'll never replace twitter or facebook. But
HN will never replace Reddit and Lobsters will never replace HN, yet both are
doing pretty well for the communities they serve. Once you bend your head
around the concept that fediverse communities as a whole have no interest in
replicating Twitter or Facebook it starts to make a lot more sense.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
We may not be on the same page, but we're probably at least on adjacent pages.
:)

I should be clear that I like Mastodon despite all my complaints -- it's just
that I often feel as if I like it more in theory than practice. I've had
better luck with Micro.blog, which is a different approach to the same problem
(i.e., own your own content), built on top of webmentions and syndication
feeds. But I'm not sure it's really a _better_ approach, just different.

~~~
iuguy
Oooh Micro.blog looks interesting. Is it open source?

~~~
chipotle_coyote
I don't think the timeline bits are, although I think it's under
consideration. (Sorry for being extremely fuzzy there.) I know you don't
actually have to pay for hosting with them, which I don't think they do a
great job of communicating yet -- a hosted Micro.blog is actually just Jekyll
with a web front end, and there are people using their own Jekyll setups, or
WordPress, or a few other solutions. (I'm pretty sure the timeline is actually
built on top of JSON Feed and webmentions.)

------
peterwwillis
Unrelated: Openbenches, you don't have a single picture of the greatest
benches in America? [http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/wp-
content/uploads/2011/03/...](http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/wp-
content/uploads/2011/03/IMG_0841.jpg)

~~~
cwmma
I think you are confusing it with this bench
[https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/jamacia-pond-
bench](https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/jamacia-pond-bench)

------
jonathankoren
Same thing happened with my @busplungebot . All it did was post articles where
about about buses plunging off cliffs have occurred. Hell, I think I was the
only follower.

I haven’t even bothered to log in and fix it.

------
DoreenMichele
_Despite the promises, the followers never returned.

We only had a few hundred, not bad for a parochial project on the
psychogeography of memorials, but now we had zero._

They currently have 396, including me.

~~~
martin-adams
Maybe you were looking at the following, not the followers. I see 222
followers.

~~~
DoreenMichele
No. It's up to 427 currently:

 _OpenBenches.org @openbenches Made with in Oxford by @edent and @summerbeth
openbenches.org 393 Following 427 Followers_

~~~
martin-adams
Very strange, I now see 396 following and 257 followers. Social blade confirms
the follower number too. I wonder if there's some Twitter caching going on.

~~~
DoreenMichele
No clue, though the count I currently see is 458, fwiw.

------
Rjevski
I love it how they have “automated systems that remove spam” that somehow
remove innocent accounts like this one but completely fail to remove blatantly
obvious spam.

I don’t expect the system to be bulletproof and remove advanced spam rings,
but when obvious spam is allowed to stay on the platform I’m wondering what
the idiots at Twitter are really doing.

~~~
komali2
Hold on, I've reported multiple _extraordinarily obvious_ spam rings before,
with accounts as old as 2013, and I've even kicked up a stink here when
Twitter employees show up, and I was told "bots don't violate the TOS."

I just checked, it's still there
[https://mobile.twitter.com/ksfAKBARI](https://mobile.twitter.com/ksfAKBARI)
check followers/following for a massive ring of obvious spam.

~~~
dawnerd
It took a lot of effort to get twitter to do something about the crypto spam
accounts targeting elon musk. SO obvious yet none of their systems seemed to
catch it.

~~~
komali2
They're doing something about it? I saw some yesterday.

~~~
dawnerd
They've definitely been a lot less common. Two months ago the first few dozen
comments were all botnets saying they received the money.

------
ReedJessen
If I was looking for a sneaky way to get huge number of followers, this kind
of sob story might be the way to do it. ;)

------
gojomo
Seems like Twitter's 'automated systems' are to incrementally ban every
account, for unspecified reasons, then re-instate those who figure out how to
object.

(Of course, if this were a conscious strategy, they'd probably be better about
not destroying following/follower state through a cycle.)

------
jwilk
"The BlockChain"? What's that?

~~~
moocowtruck
no one knows

------
gesman
Another casualty of betting business on someone else's platform.

USE someone else's platforms for what they're good at - gather leads and
connections and steering them to the platform you own.

OWN your data.

~~~
ghostly_s
Please read the story before commenting next time. They did not _build a
business_ on Twitter. It's not even a business, and they were using Twitter
for publicity, exactly as intended. Having a major arm of your project's
publicity platform wiped out arbitrarily is still shitty, and still Twitter's
fault.

------
TekMol
What was actually lost? Aren't followers just a number? Did they interact with
you in any meaningful way? Did they contribute to the project?

My experience is that even thousands of Twitter followers amount to no real
contribution to anything.

Anybody here with a different experience?

------
thaumaturgy
So what's the current feeling on HN towards stories like this one?

They seem fairly repetitive and uninteresting: users use something with no
customer service, automated system goes haywire and
bans/blocks/disables/inconveniences their account, the only way they have to
get it resolved is to make some noise about it, they then return to using the
service, nothing changes.

At this point I'm tempted to flag stories like this one that don't have some
kind of new angle or widespread interest, but thought I'd see how others are
feeling about it first.

~~~
extralego
I don’t understand the reason for flagging it. I get the impression that you
are flagging it for not being novel or unique. I can relate, but that is
concerning in itself.

The general concern here could not be anymore relevant, and discounting that
merely because it lacks novelty seems at least decadent and at most snobery.

Without even taking a stance on the issue being discussed, I think we can all
agree that these sorts of issues that come up in our society and seem to
affect all of us are in our noblest interests to take concern with.

I say we let these articles live.

~~~
thaumaturgy
The danger with low-effort topics like this is that they can take over a site
(see e.g. [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tscc3e5eujrsEeFN4/well-
kept-...](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tscc3e5eujrsEeFN4/well-kept-gardens-
die-by-pacifism)). At a guess, there've been several hundred submissions like
this to HN over the years, and yet this is an approach to business that
established companies and startups alike continue to follow. There's no sign
that any of this noise is changing the actual business practices at all, and
the problem is common enough that the /r/videos subreddit has had a "YouTube
Drama" tag for certain videos for quite a while now.

But, okay. It looks like the general opinion is that it would be inappropriate
to flag them.

~~~
extralego
I can see where you’re coming from. Repetitive formulaic content can
definitely contribute a lot of noise on sites like this.

But, I think these articles are not the result of formula or even a
superficial trend. I can’t imagine what the motive would be. Until further
notice, these articles seem to mostly be coming from a place of genuine
concern.

What if the reason we keep seeing the posts is that the problem is simply that
significant?

Speaking from a more personal perspective, I am surprised that the problem
continues like it does. It seems like the exact sort of societies are built to
prevent. It can ruin livelihoods, can happen to anyone, at any time, the
causes are blackboxed, and there is almost always no recourse.

