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0 pointsChuckMcM9y ago0 comments

Conceptually I agree with you, Twitter should be able to shut down a botnet like this by simply 'identifying bogus twitter accounts' (aka twitter bots) and 'deleting those accounts en masse.'

The part where it gets weird though is that twitter already has massive botnets which run around in it retweeting things and what not. Which they do not shut down. So is that because they don't want to? Because they can't? or simply because it isn't worth their time? That is still an unresolved question for me.

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4 comments · 2 top-level

luminiferous9y ago· 2 in thread

I suspect it's because the Twitter bots inflate the user count of Twitter. It seems that even though Twitter's monetization is not the greatest, their valuation mostly comes from the number of users on Twitter. The reasoning process seems to be something like, "Twitter doesn't make a lot of money right now, but they have the ear of some 300 million users, and that's going to be valuable in the future when they get their monetization story correct, right?" And so TWTR prices are kept afloat. Bots probably degrade the user experience of Twitter quite a bit, but if Twitter aggressively bans all bots, their user count goes down maybe 15%[1], and what does that do to their stock price?

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.03107.pdf

dibstern9y ago

Good observations. However, user experience matters more in growing the company (it helps user growth and retention), rather than user numbers and short-term stock price

jacobush9y ago

Yes - but who is calling the shots?

icebraining9y ago

Wait, what's wrong with Twitter bots? I run one that tweets questions made on a QA platform, and people seem to find it useful.

Some are shitty, but that seems considerably harder to detect.

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