[ErikAugust]

I have spent several years working on a product (https://www.rapidcrowd.co) that cuts through the noise (bots, fake accounts, inactives) of Twitter to find real users that fit related topics - and your rough estimate of 20 real users in 1000 tweets isn't too far off.

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.

[MBCook]

When I first joined Twitter a few years ago I tried the ‘search near me’ feature a few times.

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.

[notahacker]

But these bots exist because some people actually use Twitter as a newsfeed for that sort of thing. And being partly an RSS substitute is surely part of Twitter's business model these days. Not suggesting that many of these accounts weren't still absolute garbage, but the signal/noise ratio isn't always great with obviously human-run accounts either.

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

[throwawaypanda]

>But these bots exist because some people actually use Twitter as a newsfeed for that sort of thing.

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.

[rapind]

We tweet the scores of our games automatically from our backend. There's no profit in it, but our members appreciate it based on follows and retweets. That's real people following and retweeting. I actually comb through and remove obviously fake accounts from following us.

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.

[MBCook]

That sounds fair. Maybe it’s more of a volume issue. You get one or two ‘bot tweets’ per day without paying.

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.

[ohashi]

I was signing up for your service until I saw the permissions your app wants. Permission to update my profile? See my DMs? It doesn't explain anywhere I could find why it needs these permissions.

[ErikAugust]

We do not have any application functionality relating to modifying profiles.

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.

[chatmasta]

How is what you are describing any different from sponsored tweets?

[ErikAugust]

You don't have to follow a bot, so you will never see their tweets in your timeline. You can't remove a sponsored tweet from your timeline.

[sbtrct]

I haven't used an official Twitter client for a while, but you certainly used to be able to block the account making a sponsored tweet, which will remove it from your timeline.