Why's that company so big? I could do that in a weekend http://danluu.com/sounds-easy/
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In most discussions about twitter on HN, a bunch of devs drop in to say bot removal is so easy twitter obv. must not care at all. Turns out twitter is removing ~1M bots/day. Twitter only has ~300M MAU, making the error tolerance v. low. This seems like a really hard problem.pic.twitter.com/Urm0t1MH57
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One thing I think is interesting is that increased scale doesn't seem to help here. Despite Zuck's bluster, I get about the same amount of spam in FB as I get in Twitter and Gmail sends me more spam than either despite probably investing much more effort in spam prevention.pic.twitter.com/LPUECycJ5n
![". . . It’s why Twitter can’t do as good of a job as we can. I mean, they face, qualitatively, the same types of issues. But they can’t put in the investment. Our investment on safety is bigger than the whole revenue of their company. [laughter] And yeah, we’re operating on a bigger scale, but it’s not like they face qualitatively different questions. They have all the same types of issues that we do."](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EF4-teOU4AAX5iE.jpg)
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On the flip side, the least spammy/noisy forums I read are tiny, small enough that they can be moderated by 1-2 people. You see the same thing in other areas too, e.g., Windows has more malware risk than Mac, which has more risk than niche stuff like Haiku or Illumos.
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Sure, big platforms have more resources, but they're also bigger targets. I don't think it's obvious a priori which of these factors should win but, with current technology, it looks like being a smaller target is more effective than throwing money at the problem.
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Full confession I thought bot removal was easy
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I also thought this for a long time, but in retrospect I think I could only have thought this because I never thought about the mechanics of bot removal. For me (and I'm guessing for others), not thinking through the details is a major reason things can seem easier than they are.
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Gmail's invite system seems to have advantages. If an account is found to be bad-faith, who let them in? The referrer is evidently a gateway for bad actors; close the gateway. Doesn't stop spam from outside the platform, but probably a good strategy against abuse from within.
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Unlike gmail, there's no way to spam twitter from "outside of" twitter. As I understand it, twitter API accounts only need a phone#— basically disposable. Would twitter's clean-up teams have less work if they could more easily stop spam accounts from being created to begin with?
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I'm calling BS. Bot removal is hard. But they could start by not allowing bots to *like* or *retweet*. Right now accounts controlled through API are able to boost social signal that hen fees their collaborative filtering algorithms. this is insane and they explicitly allow it.
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Right but there are 1000's of valid 3rd party clients that also work through the API. Millions of API access tokens for both good and bad purposes.
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There was some statement from someone inside yearsssss back that was close to "it's hard to remove bots because genuine [Twitter] users already act so much like spam bots "
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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