There is enough blame to go around, but it is reasonable to blame Twitter. It is not reasonable to expect bad actors to go away. Systems designed on this assumption will always fail.
Yes, we can rightly rail against the people abusing the system, but ultimately there are 7 billion people and expecting all of them to be ethical is foolish.
However, we should expect Twitter to behave ethically and hold it to account when it so clearly fails.
By all means, keep fighting the good fight, but the only thing that can realistically improve the situation is Twitter.
I don't really get this. You seem to agree with me, but then also seem to be chastising me for blaming individuals here proudly abusing the system?
> By all means, keep fighting the good fight, but the only thing that can realistically improve the situation is Twitter.
The HN mods could grab the IP history of the fraudster user and pass them to twitter. That'd make the world incrementally better for a small period of time. Who knows, maybe Twitter could bring a lawsuit to bear. Technically that dude is describing a felony.
In this case, make a system that strictly enforces the verification so multiple accounts can't be created.
The other concern is, what should we do about it? This is where I "chastised" you, because focusing on the ethical behavior of members of the public is generally useless. If the people commenting here didn't do it, someone else would. That doesn't excuse them, but it does mean going after them isn't an effective strategy.
Imagine trying to fight email spam by shaming individual spammers. Many people have done it. It doesn't work. If those people had redirected their energy towards fixing the system, rather than the people, the spam problem could have been solved decades ago.
> The HN mods could grab the IP history of the fraudster user and pass them to twitter.
Besides setting a bad precedent for HN, this would be useless. Twitter already has access to much more information than the BBC did when they did their investigation. Twitter simply doesn't care to act on it. If it was a priority for Twitter, they would fix it, certainly not by bringing a lawsuit, but by applying a technical solution across the board.
By blaming the bad actors, you take heat off of Twitter, and encourage people to waste their efforts doing things that will never make a difference.
But... we're talking to the people that did. It is no hypothetical, no question. Past tense. Done. Did.
I'm not expecting this to axiomatically solve all twitter abuse. I do hope it will spark a conversation about how absolutely ruthlessly amoral many people here are. I hope young people looking for funding for a startup will think twice when they see what kind of environment HN creates. Do you really want to plant your flag and take money from people who enable fraudsters from the very ecosystem you plan to engage with?
I point out people like that all the time in many venues. Because I think that raising awareness of the utter amorality of the software industry means more amoral assholes will be penalized for their actions. Perhaps this is naïve, but it is a conceit I will not easily give up.
> Besides setting a bad precedent for HN,
Yeah the bad precedent of, "Don't boast about how you're destroying the ecosystem we're trying to build a living on." We wouldn't want to disenfranchise the wretched thieving toe-rags who think making political twitterbomb networks, now would we?
> Twitter already has access to much more information than the BBC did when they did their investigation. Twitter simply doesn't care to act on it. If it was a priority for Twitter, they would fix it, certainly not by bringing a lawsuit, but by applying a technical solution across the board.
It's curious how the instant I mention sending data to twitter for enforcement suddenly that, too, is useless. We should focus on making twitter do something but since they don't care we shouldn't bother. Lower our arms from supplication and sink into the mud, I suppose?
> By blaming the bad actors, you take heat off of Twitter,
No see, I have enough incandescent bile that I can do both. But you seem to want to do neither.
Around the election, I noticed on every Trump tweet the second or third reply would be someone selling a "liberal tears" mug. They had a set sequence of posts and replies leading up to that one with the link and they hit every single one of Trump's posts like clockwork. This went on for weeks. We are talking about blatant and totally unambiguous commercial spam on one of the highest-profile Twitter accounts. If they don't even deal with the trivially obvious, what are they going to do about the sophisticated attacks which just so happen to inflate the numbers that affect their revenue?
The precedent I am talking about would be HN moderators getting involved in detective work and in reporting people, a huge and unrewarding task, in this case, for a company that perfectly obviously doesn't care, and is just going to drop the information on the floor. And what are they going to do with one IP address, anyway? I understand your outrage, but it just isn't practical.
If you want to make Twitter do something, outrage directed at their top management, where it belongs, may have an effect, if it gets picked up by the press and starts to affect their share price or advertisers. Even that is a long shot.
Honestly, if you really care, I hope you can find some people building something better and collaborate with them, rather than trying to make Twitter better, which I think is unlikely to ever work.
Capability is not a moral license to hurt others. If it were, you'd be morally responsible to kill as many people as possible.
My third paragraph is saying this: The US elections were decided by and large by social media plays. There are hints of illegal use by campaign actors, but even beyond that it was the first election we had where widespread bots on facebook and twitter were engaging the electorate. That and the repeal of the VRA are definitely factors in why the democrats lost while still keeping the popular vote.
I've been in this industry since a time when I was a teenager being laughed at for texting ("It'll never catch on."), using social networks ("Why not just call them?"), and reading online news ("WIRED doesn't put real journalism on their website, and slashdot isn't news"). Many people who are on the internet today take for granted that society has accepted this state of affairs, but it's the work of decades of amassing respectability and providing value.
And now in the public eye: dismantling the ability to associate and speak freely because the majority of even first world rich actors cannot use it responsibly.
Sure, there is blame for Twitter and Facebook for not ignoring the problem. But the people here relating in a chipper tone how they're undermining the system because, "Tragedy of the commons?" They're so stupid they're literally biting the hand that feeds them because it's a rush to commit minor fraud.
(Aside: It's very sad that Twitter fired blake so long ago, because he predicted exactly this would happen. Twitter's management didn't want to think about it, so they made him leave. Typical execs.)