While I hope this is a step in the right direction, I'm not too wowed by this new policy. The term "good bot" is incredibly vague, and I wasn't able to find a much better definition within the policy change itself. The limitations they want to set on bots aren't too limiting either, basically if you pinky swear to behave, you're a good bot. They mention things like no bulk following or spam posting content, but surely these things could be limited in some way by their API, with whitelisted exemptions for the academic groups they want to target?<p>I also find fault with this statement from the article:<p>> Going forward, developers must specify if they’re operating a bot account, what the account is, and who is behind it. This way, explains Twitter, “it’s easier for everyone on Twitter to know what’s a bot – and what’s not.”<p>It may be known to Twitter who is and isn't a bot, but unless something has changed, there is no public facing way to know if an account is a bot. I have never understood this. Sites like Mastodon and Discord clearly label bot accounts, but Twitter has never done so. They are fine labeling accounts arbitrarily as 'verified', but not clearly identifying bots. This would be a great step forward if they want to redefine bot behavior on the site.
Lots of those that build on the Twitter platform gets burned at some point. They have shown not themselves to be a reliable partner. Any company doing social media management at some point gets hurt by changing APIs and increasing fees, sometimes causing fatal damage to their business.
I had a bot once, which would tweet a single word from the 300k most used words in German every 15 minutes (there is a corpus for that). The bot even had "Bot" in it's name.<p>It got striked several times by Twitter because of "hate-speech". Yes, the words were unfiltered - of course. That's language. The longest strike lasted for 5 days. It goes without saying that I disputed every single strike to no avail.<p>I finally took the bot down.
> Twitter says since it introduced a new developer review process in July 2018, it has reviewed over a million developer applications and approved 75%.<p>There is still no re-review process however. I have an original apps.twitter.com account and used the new development experience form with the first few weeks.<p>I essentially requested API access for personal projects and was denied with no substantive explanation.<p>There is a form to submit a platform request hidden away in the support area (literally, it's not even on the page that lists all of the contact forms) but having used it about five times over a number of years has led to no response.<p>I would like to be a developer, contributing to the ecosystem I've been a member of for just over 10 years but Twitter seems to make this exceedingly hard with no recourse available :(
"Twitter rewrites developer policy" is a frequent enough occurrence that I'd be highly reluctant to build anything material on top of the ever-shifting sands that comprise their APIs.
I've been supporting their API for several years, with a 3rd party library. It's always been mixed feelings, remembering the early days when the ecosystem was exciting and growing, yet the intermediate years when it felt like developers and businesses that built on their platform were getting screwed. Overall, it would be great if they could figure out how to clean up the bad actors, yet build a thriving platform for innovation - a balance they seem tortured to achieve. While a lot of developers have come and gone, I'm still hoping for better.
Years ago I wrote a bot to correct people's poor grammar (specifically "I could care less"), stayed within the API limits, and clearly labeled the account as a bot. Banned by Twitter within a week. Their policies have always been arbitrary and selective, and this kind of vague language ensures that will continue.
The issue I see is that it limits the usage to those associated with Academic Institutions. What if you're a data scientist, or an interested person, not working in Academia? Any research you'd want to do and publish isn't good enough, unrelated to the research itself? Seems unfortunate.
I run a couple of 'good' bots:<p><a href="https://twitter.com/thehugfairy" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/thehugfairy</a> - Sends Twitter hugs. You sign up at hugfairy.com to tell it who to hug. This one get's a lot of use. The website has about 1,500 DAU.<p><a href="https://twitter.com/smithsonianbot" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/smithsonianbot</a> - A more recent one, which sends random photos from Smithsonian's Open Access collection.<p>Overall I'm glad to see Twitter clarifying their rules. I've had API keys revoked without warning, my accounts deactivated, etc. Twitter dev support is always nice and I've gotten the bots running again, but it would be great to know in advance how I can avoid getting shut down.
Has anyone ever been refused a developer account? I wanted to write some scraper and did the form, but they rejected, told me in the email there was no appeal, and I guess that's it?
As someone who has made GPT-2-based Twitter bots, I think the reasonable compromise to the arbitrary app approval process is to allow limited bot access (tweeting only, no replies) through the API without requiring app approval. That would cover the majority of genuine fun bot use cases.
As long as they stop leaving apps dead on the water whenever they decide to maybe develop something remotely related, as has happened several times in the past, then I guess this is good? My previous exp with them isn't super encouraging unfortunately.
Hard to believe they won't artificially stifle or prohibit successful use cases, like every other time people built on Twitter. There used to be a whole ecosystem of successful alternate clients, link shorteners, image/video hosting, tweet analytics and other software and it all got deliberately destroyed as Twitter wanted to appropriate the engagement those developers had.<p><a href="https://www.accuracast.com/news/social-media-7471/twitter-bans-third-party-apps/" rel="nofollow">https://www.accuracast.com/news/social-media-7471/twitter-ba...</a><p>> In effect ad networks like ‘Sponsored Tweets’ and ‘Ad.ly’ will be discontinued.<p><a href="https://thenextweb.com/twitter/2012/08/17/twitter-4/" rel="nofollow">https://thenextweb.com/twitter/2012/08/17/twitter-4/</a><p>> These changes effectively kill off the growth of the third-party client ecosystem as we know it.
I don't like the term "good bot" and I really don't like the term "'good' bot", as if bots are always evil. We should just think of them "useful bots", "useless bots", or "malicious bots".
I know I will be downvoted, but I don't care: why are people using Twitter? To me it's the most vile and disgusting platform: no signal, just noise. On top of that, the people that run it are effectively coming up with arbitrary progressive left-wing policies on restricting free speech: for proof, watch this: <a href="https://youtu.be/DZCBRHOg3PQ" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/DZCBRHOg3PQ</a> after seeing I realised Twitter/Facebook/Google/Apple are evil corporations taking away your freedom with you cheering to it. Why are you using Twitter's platform? For business? Do you want to make business from Twitter's users which are mind-numbed angry, twitching zombies? Are there no business opportunities elsewhere? Anyone who is doing any sort of business related to social media is wasting their time: it's a broken system that deserves to be boycotted. To anyone who would call me angry: I am saying this so you open your mind about the pointlessness of social media: I dont use it, and I seem to live a nice life, only time I get angry is when I think about social media, like in this post. Oh well, this is HN after all, born and bred in silicon valley where such blasphemy will not be tolerated. But lets see.
They're just picking winners that align with their own ideology at this point. The dangers of authoritarianism are latent in any power structure - whether government, corporate, or other.<p>This is bad for society.