[HN Gopher] Twitter rewrites developer policy to better support ...
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Twitter rewrites developer policy to better support research and
'good' bots
Author : ajaviaad
Score : 98 points
Date : 2020-03-10 19:49 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (techcrunch.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (techcrunch.com)
| zacksinclair wrote:
| Seems like we're going full circle with Twitter now.
| cfv wrote:
| As long as they stop leaving apps dead on the water whenever they
| decide to maybe develop something remotely related, as has
| happened several times in the past, then I guess this is good? My
| previous exp with them isn't super encouraging unfortunately.
| rhizome wrote:
| This could very well be a "they let Jack remain CEO" dangle, so
| I'm going to be waiting for another shoe to drop. People will
| jump on it right away and one of those people will be the first
| to get burned by whatever develops (and I'm pretty sure there
| will be burning in the future), and we'll hear about it then.
| That's the point at which I'll decide to participate or not.
| aquova wrote:
| While I hope this is a step in the right direction, I'm not too
| wowed by this new policy. The term "good bot" is incredibly
| vague, and I wasn't able to find a much better definition within
| the policy change itself. The limitations they want to set on
| bots aren't too limiting either, basically if you pinky swear to
| behave, you're a good bot. They mention things like no bulk
| following or spam posting content, but surely these things could
| be limited in some way by their API, with whitelisted exemptions
| for the academic groups they want to target?
|
| I also find fault with this statement from the article:
|
| > Going forward, developers must specify if they're operating a
| bot account, what the account is, and who is behind it. This way,
| explains Twitter, "it's easier for everyone on Twitter to know
| what's a bot - and what's not."
|
| It may be known to Twitter who is and isn't a bot, but unless
| something has changed, there is no public facing way to know if
| an account is a bot. I have never understood this. Sites like
| Mastodon and Discord clearly label bot accounts, but Twitter has
| never done so. They are fine labeling accounts arbitrarily as
| 'verified', but not clearly identifying bots. This would be a
| great step forward if they want to redefine bot behavior on the
| site.
| sneak wrote:
| I personally object to these sorts of editorial labels. Bots
| are operated by humans; these are human accounts. They're just
| alts. They should not be treated differently. There's no such
| thing as a "bot post": just human beings using different types
| of software to author posts.
|
| Literally every single "bot post" was posted by a real person.
| That person's posts should not be segregated as a result of
| their client software.
| wolco wrote:
| I will go further. If the thought was orginal and came from
| the bot we should not treat it's message as second class.
| wpietri wrote:
| As a person who runs a bot (@sfships) as well as a real
| Twitter account (@williampietri), I strongly disagree. It's
| like saying that there's no difference between talking to the
| store manager and standing next to an in-store TV running a
| commercial on a loop.
|
| Twitter is mainly about human-to-human connection, and that
| should be the presumption for any account one comes across.
| Other uses should be obvious, or at least declared.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _I strongly disagree. It 's like saying that there's no
| difference between talking to the store manager and
| standing next to an in-store TV running a commercial on a
| loop._
|
| No. The commercial in a loop is clearly recognized as such.
| Twitter is more like the difference between talking to the
| store manager on the phone and talking to a voice script on
| the phone which _claims_ to be the store manager.
|
| Good luck getting your problem resolved with the voice
| script. Some voice scripts are good enough that some people
| can't tell the difference between it. And that's arguably
| fine! If you can't tell the difference, then is there a
| problem?
|
| But enter in the poor soul who can't get that voice script
| to go _off_ script to solve that customer 's problem. Or,
| nefariously, the voice script that can cause problems en
| masse because there isn't a human in the loop, or even if
| there is then the human simply doesn't understand that
| they're causing problems.
| jethro_tell wrote:
| I think instead of disambiguating between good and bad
| bots, they should just allow 'bot accounts' @NAME - bot. If
| bots want to do their thing, that is fine, and there's
| certainly a place for bot accounts, it's just when they
| mascaraed as people.
|
| I'm not sure how you separate them out entirely, I would
| assume that twitter knows though.
| behindsight wrote:
| (slightly offtopic, hope you don't mind)
|
| I believe the term is: masquerade.
|
| Though mascaraed is technically correct, it just denotes
| wearing mascara and not to "mask" oneself as someone
| else.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| I'm fairly sure "mascara" isn't valid as a intransitive
| verb (transitive would be applying mascara _to_
| something), so "when they mascaraed as people" would
| still be incorrect. Wearing mascara would be "when they
| _were_ mascaraed as people ". (Although it's probably a
| typo rather than a word choice error, so <shrug>.)
| baggachipz wrote:
| Years ago I wrote a bot to correct people's poor grammar
| (specifically "I could care less"), stayed within the API
| limits, and clearly labeled the account as a bot. Banned by
| Twitter within a week. Their policies have always been
| arbitrary and selective, and this kind of vague language
| ensures that will continue.
| moeffju wrote:
| That is pretty spammy and, frankly, obnoxious. Not only is
| language constantly evolving, chances are that people didn't
| actually ask to be corrected (using commonly used and
| understood language), much less by a bot?
| tyre wrote:
| > chances are that people didn't actually ask to be
| corrected
|
| If you remove the tweets that are something the parent
| tweet didn't ask for comment on, there would be nothing
| left.
| andrewzah wrote:
| There's a difference between not asking for a reply, and
| not asking for corrections for your grammar.
|
| Correcting native speakers when they didn't ask is
| obnoxious. Particularly from an automated bot.
| baggachipz wrote:
| I freely admit I did it mostly for the lulz, but the whole
| point of twitter is that people are shouting into the
| ether. Hardly anyone "asks" for responses from other
| accounts. My account has as much right to post and reply as
| theirs did.
| qweqweewqewq wrote:
| Yeah, that sounds horribly obnoxious. Glad it was banned.
| jachee wrote:
| Meanwhile, as a correlation of their caprice, my @fiveobot is
| still going strong after tweeting hourly for going-on-three
| years.
| andrewzah wrote:
| I'm glad it got banned, frankly. Those sorts of bots on
| Reddit are extremely spammy and annoying.
|
| Being a "grammar nazi" used to be a thing on Reddit and I'm
| glad it died out.
| baggachipz wrote:
| It violated no rules, and was all in good fun. All it did
| was reply with "Are you sure you _couldn 't_ care less?"
| nl wrote:
| I'm glad it got banned too - bot replies are the worst.
|
| And since it's nit-picking, it's worth noting that the
| "could/couldn't care less" thing isn't at all as clear-
| cut as you are making out.
|
| _In the early 1990s, the well-known Harvard professor
| and language writer Stephen Pinker argued that the way
| most people say "could care less"--the way they emphasize
| the words--implies they are being ironic or sarcastic
| along the lines of the Yiddish phrases like "I should be
| so lucky!" which typically means the speaker doesn't
| really expect to be so lucky. Michael Quinion of the
| wonderful World Wide Words website makes the same
| argument._
|
| and
|
| _Both Merriam-Webster and dictionary.com have weighed in
| and say "could care less" and "couldn't care less" mean
| the same thing. Their reasoning is that both phrases are
| informal, English is often illogical, and people use the
| two phrases in the same way. "Could care less" has come
| to mean the same thing as "couldn't care less."_
|
| https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/could
| -ca...
| fhoffa wrote:
| Replies are considered a spammy way of getting attention.
|
| This wasn't Twitter arbitrarily banning you, but people
| repeatedly reporting your tweets. The option is right
| there, and aptly called "Uses the reply function to
| spam".
| kazinator wrote:
| It probably did that even if you wrote a comment saying
| something like:
|
| _" I could not care less" is a malapropism we should
| strive to avoid._
| GrumpyNl wrote:
| Had to look up how many engineers they have, around 4000. That's
| a lot.
| minimaxir wrote:
| As someone who has made GPT-2-based Twitter bots, I think the
| reasonable compromise to the arbitrary app approval process is to
| allow limited bot access (tweeting only, no replies) through the
| API without requiring app approval. That would cover the majority
| of genuine fun bot use cases.
| allovernow wrote:
| They're just picking winners that align with their own ideology
| at this point. The dangers of authoritarianism are latent in any
| power structure - whether government, corporate, or other.
|
| This is bad for society.
| rhizome wrote:
| > _They 're just picking winners that align with their own
| ideology at this point_
|
| Which is why Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn and all of them
| are actually publishers, akin to the Washington Times or Fox
| News, and don't (currently) deserve SS230 protection.
| benologist wrote:
| Hard to believe they won't artificially stifle or prohibit
| successful use cases, like every other time people built on
| Twitter. There used to be a whole ecosystem of successful
| alternate clients, link shorteners, image/video hosting, tweet
| analytics and other software and it all got deliberately
| destroyed as Twitter wanted to appropriate the engagement those
| developers had.
|
| https://www.accuracast.com/news/social-media-7471/twitter-ba...
|
| > In effect ad networks like 'Sponsored Tweets' and 'Ad.ly' will
| be discontinued.
|
| https://thenextweb.com/twitter/2012/08/17/twitter-4/
|
| > These changes effectively kill off the growth of the third-
| party client ecosystem as we know it.
| QuinnyPig wrote:
| "Twitter rewrites developer policy" is a frequent enough
| occurrence that I'd be highly reluctant to build anything
| material on top of the ever-shifting sands that comprise their
| APIs.
| penagwin wrote:
| > I'd be reluctant to use their API's.
|
| I'm not sure what you mean - what choice do you have? You're
| either building a twitter bot, or you aren't and it doesn't
| matter?
|
| Also this isn't much (if any?) of an API change, it's a policy
| change. And even then it doesn't look like it should negatively
| affect you unless you were doing something nefarious already.
| wpietri wrote:
| The choice is of what to do with one's time. If Twitter had
| been a reliable partner to developers, more people would make
| things for it.
| penagwin wrote:
| Fair enough, that's a good point.
|
| Now that you mention it, a bot-oriented twitter clone might
| be interesting...
| [deleted]
| uk_programmer wrote:
| > I'm not sure what you mean - what choice do you have?
|
| I can choose not to interact with their platform at all. I
| can also find other ways of interacting with them in other
| ways (scraping or headless browser automation).
|
| > Also this isn't much (if any?) of an API change, it's a
| policy change. And even then it doesn't look like it should
| negatively affect you unless you were doing something
| nefarious already.
|
| If you are investing time and effort into an endeavour
| (whatever it is) it helps to know whether ground is likely to
| disappear from under you.
|
| Microsoft while many people don't like them have kept many
| ancient APIs working e.g. We have code from 2005 that still
| works with the latest .NET Runtime with rather minimal
| changes. This provides you with confidence that going forward
| you won't face a lot of churn.
|
| Policies while they aren't APIs are important in that they
| are both clear, applied fairly and don't change on a whim. A
| lot of people are sceptical that Twitter will do any of those
| based on previous behaviour.
| dtrailin wrote:
| Lots of those that build on the Twitter platform gets burned at
| some point. They have shown not themselves to be a reliable
| partner. Any company doing social media management at some point
| gets hurt by changing APIs and increasing fees, sometimes causing
| fatal damage to their business.
| riffic wrote:
| >They have shown themselves to be a reliable partner
|
| I hope you mean the opposite? Twitter has long been an
| unreliable partner in the developer ecosystem.
| bmelton wrote:
| Not sure if edited, but your quote is slightly off. Should be
|
| > They have shown not themselves to be a reliable partner
|
| The "not" there feels like it's in an ambiguous spot, but at
| least gives a faint connotation of the author's intent, which
| reads as you'd like it to.
| rhizome wrote:
| Even GP flailed it and put the 'not' in the wrong place.
| Should be "They have shown themselves not to be a reliable
| partner."
| dorkwood wrote:
| Also acceptable would be "they have shown themselves to
| be a reliable partner... not"
| a1369209993 wrote:
| That could be interpreted as "they have not shown
| themselves to be a reliable partner" (ie we don't know)
| instead of the correct "they have shown themselves to not
| be a reliable partner" (ie we know they aren't), though.
| Jaygles wrote:
| Perhaps they mean Twitter is reliably unreliable?
| TekMol wrote:
| Now that scraping has been deemed legal by the highest curts,
| how can anybody still get burned by API fees?
| godzillabrennus wrote:
| Scraping, while legal now, is still not free. A scrape does
| not give you the delta between two points in time without a
| completely new scrape. You cannot economically sustainably
| scrape the entirety of a large site like Twitter.
|
| If I'm wrong I'd love to learn from someone smarter than me.
|
| Even google doesn't scrape the entire web every day.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| "Legal" and "won't be interfered with" are not the same
| thing. That it's legal to scrape doesn't mean they can't put
| captchas, IP blocks, etc. in your way.
|
| Scraping doesn't really help when _publishing_ tweets,
| either.
| MrGilbert wrote:
| I had a bot once, which would tweet a single word from the 300k
| most used words in German every 15 minutes (there is a corpus for
| that). The bot even had "Bot" in it's name.
|
| It got striked several times by Twitter because of "hate-speech".
| Yes, the words were unfiltered - of course. That's language. The
| longest strike lasted for 5 days. It goes without saying that I
| disputed every single strike to no avail.
|
| I finally took the bot down.
| lucasmullens wrote:
| I mean, in German you can cram a pretty large amount of hateful
| information into a single word, since many words are a
| combination of words. I'd be curious to see what specifically
| was flagged.
| dickjocke wrote:
| Has anyone ever been refused a developer account? I wanted to
| write some scraper and did the form, but they rejected, told me
| in the email there was no appeal, and I guess that's it?
| riffic wrote:
| > Has anyone ever been refused a developer account?
|
| https://twitter.com/search?q=twitter%20denied%20access%20API...
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Yes. I got rejected because their email asking for more info
| went to spam, and that rejection was final, with no appeal
| permitted.
|
| I get a final rejection after several rounds, but the very
| first time? Because of non-response? Ooof.
|
| Luckily, this was just on my personal account, not for work.
| dickjocke wrote:
| Actually, yes I recall now this is exactly what happened to
| me! I applied and forgot about it, assuming it didn't matter
| to them when I responded. What a bummer
| TheSwordsman wrote:
| The issue I see is that it limits the usage to those associated
| with Academic Institutions. What if you're a data scientist, or
| an interested person, not working in Academia? Any research you'd
| want to do and publish isn't good enough, unrelated to the
| research itself? Seems unfortunate.
| wpietri wrote:
| From their perspective, it's a way of offloading the otherwise
| large amount of work needed to evaluate a given researcher.
| Universities have reputations to protect, and so have things
| like deans and provosts and IRBs. Whereas any random interested
| person could be the next Cambridge Analytica. So like so much
| regulation, it's unfortunate but made necessary by jerks.
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