
Twitter accidentally suspends its own CEO's account - dudisbrie
http://money.cnn.com/2016/11/23/technology/twitter-jack-dorsey-ceo-founder-account-suspension/index.html
======
Pigo
The interview was pretty interesting. Sacca's description of how they make it
hard to follow what's going on, even though they know first, sums up why I
don't use Twitter. Twitter always feels like I'm walking into the middle of
someone else's conversation or inside joke. I rarely have enough context to
engage, but people who like to just be loud, or talk to themselves, or don't
have a clue can go to town.

Maybe I'm doing it wrong.

~~~
fogleman
Back and forth discussions are not the primary use of Twitter. I had a hard
time with that for years too before I finally "figured it out." You just need
to follow a lot of people who share your interests and then your timeline will
become more interesting.

~~~
nobleach
It does... until everyone stops talking about those interesting things, and
starts ranting non-stop about politics. I may even share their political
views... but I'd rather be able to mute that garbage and only read about the
stuff I have interest in.

~~~
eric_h
Yeah, I follow mostly nerds and comedians on twitter. Up until this election
season, most of my feed was nerds talking about things they built and
comedians telling jokes.

Now my feed is literally 60% nerds talking about politics and comedians
talking about politics.

~~~
kalleboo
I'm also something like this. Luckily, Americans are a minority in my feed, so
while the previously topical tweets of those who I unfollowed will be missed,
it was not a big change for me.

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fowlerpower
Silicone Valley companies wield too much power when it comes to these sorts of
things. This is just another example of this, if they don't self regulate
there will be laws that regulate them.

Google was banning people's email and their entire digital life because of
buying multiple pixel phones. This is an unrelated issue but they took it upon
themselves to just use their unlimited power to screw people. It's like your
electricity company shutting off your heat because you didn't pay for some
stove, if they sold both things.

These companies would so themseves a lot of justice by setting up a this party
group that manages hear abuses and is impartial.

~~~
gnicholas
"Silicone Valley" is actually in Southern California—land of the implants.

~~~
hodgesrm
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
Inigo Montoya

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kevin_b_er
I wonder if Twitter is susceptible to mass report attacks. I strongly suspect
many of these systems just automatically suspend someone for too many reports.
This makes it convenient if you don't like someone else's politics to just get
a group to mass report them and you can silence whomever you want.

~~~
pjc50
This is definitely a problem which some users have been exploiting on twitter.

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falcolas
This illustrates the limitations of machine learning and automated processes
when applied to the real world. Until GAI is achieved, you really need to
couple ML with humans to correct the mistakes made by ML.

Think Iron Man, not Ultron.

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Jedd

      > just setting up my twttr...again
      > (account suspension was an internal mistake)
    

Did he really just abbreviate his company name ... and no other words?

~~~
detaro
throwback to his first tweet:
[https://twitter.com/jack/status/20](https://twitter.com/jack/status/20)

Back then, Twitter was called twttr.

~~~
martin-adams
Not just his first tweet, Twitter's first tweet.

~~~
ben_jones
Bull shit. We all know the first tweet was either 'test' or 'hello, world'.

~~~
typetypetype
...followed by a whole lot of "gudsfgjhgfkjhgdasf"

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the_mitsuhiko
Did they restore his followers from a backup or do you keep them through
suspension?

~~~
kintamanimatt
It's a suspension, not a deletion, which implies it's possible to resume the
account. It seems logical that the state of the account would be entirely
preserved for later restoration.

~~~
logicallee
so why does the article report that only 3.8 out of 3.9 million followers were
restored? While overall I would say that is pretty much a rounding error, if
we look at it very carefully you have to ask: did literally 100,000 people
proactively choose to unsubscribe, from an account that obviously remains
important, and moreover during a time when it was inactive? Would his tweet
have been so 'spammy' that 1 out of 39 of his every follower decided on that
basis alone to unsubscribe?

If the full number of followers were not restored, it raises the question of
why not?

I don't know how to get historical "number of followers" information - as of
this moment :

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

the numbers I see are " 20.6K tweets, following: 2,2264, followers: 2.63M,
likes: 15.1K, lists: 3"

for good measure and lest someone try to rewrite history here's a screenshot I
just took: [http://i.imgur.com/JJQKPI9.png](http://i.imgur.com/JJQKPI9.png)

The figure CNN quotes is: "Soon after Dorsey was reinstated, his number of
followers was showing up as only about 145 -- a steep drop from the roughly
3.9 million he had previously. The figure later popped back up to around 3.8
million."

So what exactly happened to cause 1.2M twitter followers to decide to unfollow
him?

Sure, he's a heavy tweeter - I wouldn't follow him due to the level of spam -
I mean who send 20,000 tweets in 7 years - that's 7+ per day at least.

but the people who _did_ choose to follow him - if the CNN quote above is
accurate - aren't people I would expect to unfollow him exactly around this
time.

So if CNN's figure is accurate -- what happened? And why the drop of 1 million
subscribers, or in other words one in three subscribers that he had had?

~~~
dustingetz
in distributed systems, counts are often incrementally maintained over time.
There are many ways to trigger an unfollow (e.g. account deleted or country
banned), and all the edge cases must be explicitly accounted for, or error
creeps in, which is probably what happened. 3.8M is probably the more accurate
count.

~~~
logicallee
I have no idea why anyone would downvote the current comment. I've edited to
be clear I'm being totally open-ended.

>3.8M is probably the more accurate count.

You mean "than 3.9" right? So in an open-ended way, genuinely curious here,
would you say the 2.63M he's at now (as I screenshotted for you) an "even more
accurate" figure?

just trying to understand the change in figures - I don't have a horse in this
race and can certainly accept your reasoning. I don't know much about how
these counts work.

~~~
freehunter
I don't know at all, but a number that high may be fuzzy like with reddit's
voting system. At some point to save database queries, they may just
approximate the number.

~~~
logicallee
that's an interesting perspective - though fuzzing by 46% seems more than I
would expect (but may be possible.) I got 46% by doing 3.8/2.6 (you can check
because 2.6 * 1.46 == 3.8).

\-----------------------------------

EDIT: I didn't change above the line with this edit but - why would anyone
downvote this comment too? when all I say is it's an interesting perspective.
(There are no comment replies at this time, just a downvote.) Also I reread my
comment and I noticed that it was not actually listed as 2.6 - but 2.63 -- so
two sig figs.

I actually took screenshots (for myself) with my clock, this is an interesting
change:

[http://imgur.com/a/CU7Qm](http://imgur.com/a/CU7Qm)

it's -0.11m change over about 2 hours 21 min. (take 7 seconds). I don't know
what part of that is "fuzzing" (like reddit does) what part of that is lack of
coherence (from distributed DB), and what part of that is the actual change.

I would think, if anything, it would move up during this time due to the extra
attention - maybe HN, CNN and other readers would sub to him after reading
this story. at any rate it's certainly a puzzle to me why anyone would
downvote this comment. (I don't think it's malicious and there's just one
downvote.)

~~~
freehunter
Someone in this thread is down voting just about everything. I wouldn't take
it personally.

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EJTH
Read this some where on some other forum, is this true?

> So yesterday someone found out that you can get any account banned if
> reports reach ~1000.

Is this somehow related?

