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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Replying to @hillelogram
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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Replying to @danluu @hillelogram
Gmail's spam filter gives me maybe 1 false positive per 1k correctly classified ham (I sometimes check the spam folder and this is my impression of the rate). Regularly wiping the same fraction of real users in a service would be a PR disaster and result in users fleeing.
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Replying to @danluu @hillelogram
An even worse problem: with email, if a user has an idiosyncratic notion of what's spam, that's fine b/c the classifier can be trained per user. This is impossible for bot removal since that's a global operation, but people have even more idiosyncratic views of what a bad bot is.
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Welp, that was a timely tweet. One day later: #TwitterLockOutpic.twitter.com/8brbiecifm
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