[golangnews]

Posts and interactions like likes or retweets via the api should be marked as automated, but identifying users as bots is problematic and not very useful as there are good bots and bad bots.

Many users use some automation and that’s a good thing, e.g. posting blog posts when published, bots to repost top #shithnsays for those who want to follow it, that amusing horse books bot etc.

More problematic than bots to me are the many many ways the twitter platform simply rewards the wrong thing, from verified nazis to crowds of trolls and spamming hashtags.

[michaelmior]

What about the many third party Twitter apps some users prefer to use as opposed to the official client?

[golangnews]

They could just identify those as 'posted from x', as twitter should know.

[enos]

Why is it problematic to mark a good bot as a bot?

[golangnews]

It's problematic to identify accounts as bots. Many accounts are partially posting from a bot and partially posting from a human, so what are they? Better to do that at the level of individual posts then the user would see right there that something was posted by the api, and it'd be harder for political spambots for example to flood threads, you could have options to turn off api posts for a thread. This would drive some bots to use selenium etc (perhaps some do already), but I think would be more effective than just marking accounts somehow as 'bot' with fallible detection methods.

Also most of the problems on twitter are caused by humans, not bots. Humans can be cruel, harass, bombard victims with messages, threaten them with death, rape etc (this is regularly happening right now to women on twitter), and those are the more problematic interactions. Yes sometimes spambots liking posts or replying to posts are annoying, or the ones that DM you are pretty bad, but they're not as annoying as humans at their worst.