...what?

Tumblr was known for porn long before it sold to Yahoo. If anything, Tumblr started cracking down on blogs with adult content afterwards (for example, requiring users to log in before visiting them). There was a huge backlash from artists and bloggers with non-pornographic gay-themed content, because many of them were caught in the ripple effects from these changes.

I had friends who worked at Tumblr before 2012, and the running joke was that Tumblr was 50% porn and 30% pictures of cats. (Don't take those figures too seriously, but clearly porn was a large part of Tumblr long before the acquisition).

Also, Tumblr definitely did allow adult keywords in searches. I know this because of a rather unfortunate incident at a student hackathon my company sponsored, in which a student thought it would be a "funny" idea to search for a risque phrase when demonstrating his weekend hack (an aggregator of Tumblr posts).

At boarding school many moons ago, we all used Tumblr to get our rocks off because most porn sites were blocked.

Thankfully more and more websites are based out of other countries now and don't need to swim in the puritan current of the US.

For this reason, trending topics and keyword search are essentially hijacked features.

However, because I believe there are many useful bots that have organic followings in the millions - I don't believe they need to be simply removed from the ecosystem.

Instead, my suggestion would be a 'bots' account type. Some ideas:

- A robot version of the 'blue checkmark'. This would allow users to quickly identify a tweet as sent from a bot.

- This account type could be linked to a real owners account, much like Twitter apps are. Accounts flagged and failed to register as a bot could be subject to deletion.

- Bots would automatically receive low ranking in search queries, and trending topics. Perhaps they would be completely delisted.

- Bots cannot follow other users.

- Bots cannot tweet at* other users.

More extreme:

- Bots cannot tweet without some sort of spend. Maybe they can only tweet in some ratio from real Likes they receive. This is a bit extreme, but would mitigate a lot of problems.

I really believe a happy median could be found - and currently think that a well-curated Twitter timeline is amazing, but as I stated search results and trending topics are completely broken.

Weather bots. For any city within 100 miles of where I am. Plus bots posting job listings. Plus companies posting those same job listings.

There was basically no signal to find, it was all noise. The few ‘legitimate’ ones I found were from local PD/FD.

I think they just need to ban all bots/automated postings. Or make them filters le and require a $100/mo account and $1/tweet. Something to discourage the absolute garbage.

The other issue is that the distinction between a bot and a human isn't clear-cut: there's plenty of shades of grey in between something which spits out badly-scraped listings all day and an actual human having noncommercial conversations with Twitter friends. It's more classifying what's bad behaviour (using the pornbot tactic of mass follow/unfollow to attract attention even if you're a human marketer tweeting actual content, and even if you haven't written a script to do it) and what's perfectly acceptable automation like tweet schedulers that could use some work

I would dispute that. I'd argue that the bots exist because spamming twitter is free. If it costs me $0 and I get even a tiny benefit out of it then it is to my advantage.

Its essentially the same problem as spam email.

I think this is a legitimate use of a bot. We even mention the host club because they want us to.

What's funny is that the account got squelched 3 times before we got a human at twitter to officially prevent us from getting flagged. So they do definitely have some measures in place to prevent spam accounts. I suspect it's become non-trivial to identify all the bad actors.

I know lots of people also use bots for cross posting from Instagram or something else. Or to post when they put a new article up on their site.

I’m sure you’d have to allow them to some degree. But there are some really noisy bots out there that need a fee attached to em.

We do request access so you can send Direct Messages from your dashboard. We are considering removing that functionality for the sake of privacy.

Unfortunately, the Twitter application permission model is not granular:

https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/basics/authentication/...

We would prefer to just have write functionalities and not read, but this is not possible in their model.

Careful here. This appears to be referring to the concept of fair use, but firstly there are multiple criteria used to judge fair use (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#U.S._fair_use_factors), secondly these criteria are (intentionally) subjective and up to a judge's interpretation, and thirdly fair use is US-only.

That seems fine. In the interest of their userbase, companies should aim for the least copyright-damaged user experience possible; this means picking a single country (ideally one with liberal copyright law) and ignoring copyright law in other countries they aren’t based out of. If countries want to force their censorship standards, they can at least be honest about it and block the website (rather than silently deflecting the responsibility of censorship to the website itself).

They brought the heat on themselves when they decided to mock DMCA requests and cease and desists instead of accommodating them.

There's a reason 4chan, Reddit, imgur, Tumblr and its ilk all still exist in the age of copyright. None of them produce their own content-- it's all user submitted, and mostly in violation of some copyright or another.

Generally speaking, my understanding is that hosts aren't liable for user-uploaded content unless they curate or promote it (deletion notwithstanding). That changes their role to that of a content distributor/publisher instead of a mere platform. This is why backpage's CEO got arrested for human trafficking whereas craigslist's did not-- when challenged craigslist shut down its prostitution ads, but Backpage actively reworded and posted them and in doing so became their publisher.

I'm not saying they can't skirt the laws a little bit and get away with it, all I'm saying is they need to have awareness.

Due to the Safe Harbor rules in US copyright laws they don't really need to remove copyrighted content proactively. There's tons of subreddits exclusively dedicated to piracy that they don't care about.

I've used it for a while, and what I got is that it's goos for (and people use it) to spam others about your projects or show off. However, if you try to use it to get news or updates on anything it is the least efficient, most stressful thing I've ever used.

I see Twitter as a good tool for outages, natural disasters, and protests. That's pretty much it.

Depends heavily on the set of people you follow. I've found it to be a great source of news, and I typically see news show up there hours to days before I see it show up in places like HN.

That said, it took months to get my feed to where it is today. It's not easy for each person to find the mix of accounts that is best for them. My recommendation is, be fast to follow folks who look interesting, and fast to unfollow folks if they are boring or you don't like them. When you find folks you like, see who they retweet, reply to, follow, etc. and follow all those folks to see what you think.

I guess you can find other people's lists and follow them? E.g. a sports journalist's sports lists etc. I have not tried to do that so not sure if there are hurdles to overcome. And maybe someone can aggregate these public lists for others to find/follow?

It's called ESPN.

I have no idea how people follow more than say a hundred people profitably.

What I find awful is that HN and Reddit save me time by sorting out low-quality content, while on Twitter you're the one that has to work hard to do it (if you can), and Twitter itself just adds more noise in the meantime.

This is particularly relevant for hyper-local media which basically has zero media footprint outside of dead-tree newspapers and talk radio.

Basically: follow your city councilor on Twitter. Start from there.

Twitter is what you make it. I'm sincerely worried their VC backed top heavy company is going to topple over and carry with it to oblivion a service that could probably run on 1/20th of it's infrastructure.

But I see it as a way to keep track of what a columnist, journalist, or public figure is doing.

I used to have a much bigger problem on Twitter with fake accounts and bot likes than I did, but despite my decades of willingness to bitch about spam, I have to concede that they've gotten better lately.

There's also a user benefit to letting bots run when they're not hurting anyone: you don't give hints to the spammers on how you're finding and nuking them. Indeed, if you identify them but don't block them, you can get a lot of data on what is spam. For example, on my mail server, I noticed I was getting a lot of dictionary attacks. So I took the hundred most common first names not in use on my domain and fed them all into the spam training system. That means odds are very good that my spam trainer will have seen a piece of spam before they try my actual account.

Very nice!

Twitter does take a pretty dim view of DM and @reply spam though because it is genuinely annoying and not opt-in.

Twitter's model is basically "shouting at the universe" but if nobody listens it doesn't matter.

I 100% guarantee twitter knows the exact ratio of real to unreal users and their content.

They're also trying to slowly crack down on bots.

A year ago they insta locked your account if it looked like automated liking of content.

Now they're insta locking if you look like a follow/unfollow bot.

Its a balancing act and I feel like its analogous to getting out of extreme debt. They're trying to replace bots as their real user base grows internally.

I follow specific people that I've discovered outside of the network, or by referral, and as a result my feed is basically "all signal".

This seems like the only reasonable way to use Twitter now..

I am kind of surprised the number of human users is so high. I know a lot of bloggers of various sizes. To the best of my knowledge virtually all of them have hooked up one of the available services to post on their behalf. They either spend a little time scheduling out their tweets for the next week/month then forget about twitter until their schedule runs dry OR they set something up to randomly pick from some pool of blog posts and spam links.

Either way they then essentially never go on twitter again once things are up and running. The whole thing is full of bots talking to each other.

Likes, Followers and accounts yelling into some hashtags can be dominated bots. But if you look at the feeds of individual people and those that they talk with that's a totally different experience.

> Tumblr today is drowning in porn.

Tumblr has had NSFW for a long time now. If anything some of it may have migrated to patreon now that it is easier to monetize.

Would also be interesting to run similar analysis in FB, I'd expect similar rates here.

I don't know about Tumblr wrt porn - my impression is that there's a lot of sexual material there but that it's community-driven rather than commercial, partly due to the demographics of its user base.

'Drowning' in porn? In the sense that that's a bad thing?