Twitter accidentally suspends its own CEO's account

Twitter accidentally suspends its own CEO's account(money.cnn.com)

139 points by dudisbrie 9 years ago | 55 comments

Pigo 9 years ago |

The interview was pretty interesting. Sacca's description of how they make it hard to follow what's going on, even though they know first, sums up why I don't use Twitter. Twitter always feels like I'm walking into the middle of someone else's conversation or inside joke. I rarely have enough context to engage, but people who like to just be loud, or talk to themselves, or don't have a clue can go to town.

Maybe I'm doing it wrong.

coldpie 9 years ago | |

I use Twitter a lot, but mostly only as a content consumption platform. I follow people who make things I like and who say things on Twitter that I enjoy reading. The idea of using it as a conversation platform is insane to me. Sometimes I have trouble fitting a single sentence into a tweet.

eternalban 9 years ago | | |

> fitting ... into a tweet.

I enjoy the constraint and view it as a minor new art form, similar to the constraints of a Haiku. Seeing that '0' when I'm done is generally mildly pleasurable for me.

personlurking 9 years ago | |

Taking it the extreme, one needs Reply All's "Yes, Yes, No" segment (where the podcast hosts try to break down inside-joke tweets) in order to understand what I'd assume is the cleverest content.

News search & discovery is all I use the service for and I'd like to see Twitter focus on that. Also, the narrow, single-file, non-pagnated way of scrolling & searching is not appealing at all to me. I'd prefer a more horizontal and populated set of tweets with a simple X in the corner of each one in order to teach Twitter what content I'm interested in (think: Youtube's home page while signed in). The way the site looks is obviously in tune with the 140 char limit but I've never much liked that either. In short, I'm not an ideal user.

fogleman 9 years ago | |

Back and forth discussions are not the primary use of Twitter. I had a hard time with that for years too before I finally "figured it out." You just need to follow a lot of people who share your interests and then your timeline will become more interesting.

nobleach 9 years ago | | |

It does... until everyone stops talking about those interesting things, and starts ranting non-stop about politics. I may even share their political views... but I'd rather be able to mute that garbage and only read about the stuff I have interest in.

Pigo 9 years ago | | |

I've spent a lot of time curating who I follow, and I generally enjoy the people I have on there. But Tosh and the Mitch Hedberg bot don't put out enough to make up for the on-slaught of garbage, ads, and political opinions. I might find it more interesting if I was into Justin Beiber, who's trending ever time I look. Maybe I just need some suggestions on interesting feeds.

coldpie 9 years ago | | |

> You just need to follow a lot of people

Or a few people :) I follow less than 50, and a fair number of those are inactive.

fowlerpower 9 years ago |

Silicone Valley companies wield too much power when it comes to these sorts of things. This is just another example of this, if they don't self regulate there will be laws that regulate them.

Google was banning people's email and their entire digital life because of buying multiple pixel phones. This is an unrelated issue but they took it upon themselves to just use their unlimited power to screw people. It's like your electricity company shutting off your heat because you didn't pay for some stove, if they sold both things.

These companies would so themseves a lot of justice by setting up a this party group that manages hear abuses and is impartial.

gnicholas 9 years ago | |

"Silicone Valley" is actually in Southern California—land of the implants.

hodgesrm 9 years ago | | |

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” Inigo Montoya

lholden 9 years ago | |

Silicon != silicone :D. Silicon is a metalloid commonly used to produce silicon wafers for integrated circuits. (Hence, Silicon Valley :D).

Silicone is a rubbery polymer which contains silicon. :D (Ex, window calking, breast implants, etc.)

swang 9 years ago | |

> Google was banning people's email and their entire digital life because of buying multiple pixel phones.

I thought they unbanned most of the actual people. a large majority were just bot accounts used to buy up the pixel.

parthdesai 9 years ago | | |

They unbanned them because the story took off and it was bad PR for Google. Had the story never taken off, I'm pretty sure those accounts would still be banned.

freehunter 9 years ago | |

It's stuff like this that's going to bring more regulation to the Internet. The game industry purposefully created an independent group to regulate their businesses to avoid government regulation that was imminent. I agree that Internet companies need to do the same. No one wants regulation, but it's going to happen one way or the other. Either we do it ourselves on our own terms (like the ESRB) or the government does it on their terms (like HIPAA).

kevin_b_er 9 years ago |

I wonder if Twitter is susceptible to mass report attacks. I strongly suspect many of these systems just automatically suspend someone for too many reports. This makes it convenient if you don't like someone else's politics to just get a group to mass report them and you can silence whomever you want.

pjc50 9 years ago | |

This is definitely a problem which some users have been exploiting on twitter.

Kenji 9 years ago | |

Happens on youtube all the time. There are raids to take other people's videos down, usually communities between which there is a feud.

Also, people like ASMR artists have seen a lot of takedowns of completely innocuous videos where they crinkle paper or something, just because people flagged it because they thought it's stupid and ridiculous.

phyzome 9 years ago | |

It is. I won't go into details, but yes, it can be gamed.

falcolas 9 years ago |

This illustrates the limitations of machine learning and automated processes when applied to the real world. Until GAI is achieved, you really need to couple ML with humans to correct the mistakes made by ML.

Think Iron Man, not Ultron.

Jedd 9 years ago |

  > just setting up my twttr...again
  > (account suspension was an internal mistake)

Did he really just abbreviate his company name ... and no other words?

jbrooksuk 9 years ago | |

twttr is what Twitter used to be known as, and Jack's tweet is in reference to https://twitter.com/jack/status/20

hackcrafter 9 years ago | |

There is a lot of color to the context of this tweet which is very well described in Hatching Twitter [0].

Definitely would recommend, even for entertainment value, but definitely for the SV lore and understanding these references.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Hatching-Twitter-Story-Friendship-Bet...

detaro 9 years ago | |

throwback to his first tweet: https://twitter.com/jack/status/20

Back then, Twitter was called twttr.

martin-adams 9 years ago | | |

Not just his first tweet, Twitter's first tweet.

the_mitsuhiko 9 years ago |

Did they restore his followers from a backup or do you keep them through suspension?

kintamanimatt 9 years ago | |

It's a suspension, not a deletion, which implies it's possible to resume the account. It seems logical that the state of the account would be entirely preserved for later restoration.

logicallee 9 years ago | | |

so why does the article report that only 3.8 out of 3.9 million followers were restored? While overall I would say that is pretty much a rounding error, if we look at it very carefully you have to ask: did literally 100,000 people proactively choose to unsubscribe, from an account that obviously remains important, and moreover during a time when it was inactive? Would his tweet have been so 'spammy' that 1 out of 39 of his every follower decided on that basis alone to unsubscribe?

If the full number of followers were not restored, it raises the question of why not?

I don't know how to get historical "number of followers" information - as of this moment :

https://twitter.com/jack

the numbers I see are " 20.6K tweets, following: 2,2264, followers: 2.63M, likes: 15.1K, lists: 3"

for good measure and lest someone try to rewrite history here's a screenshot I just took: http://i.imgur.com/JJQKPI9.png

The figure CNN quotes is: "Soon after Dorsey was reinstated, his number of followers was showing up as only about 145 -- a steep drop from the roughly 3.9 million he had previously. The figure later popped back up to around 3.8 million."

So what exactly happened to cause 1.2M twitter followers to decide to unfollow him?

Sure, he's a heavy tweeter - I wouldn't follow him due to the level of spam - I mean who send 20,000 tweets in 7 years - that's 7+ per day at least.

but the people who did choose to follow him - if the CNN quote above is accurate - aren't people I would expect to unfollow him exactly around this time.

So if CNN's figure is accurate -- what happened? And why the drop of 1 million subscribers, or in other words one in three subscribers that he had had?

0xmohit 9 years ago | | |

> It's a suspension, not a deletion

I'd doubt that the underlying data is deleted even if you choose to delete your account.

EJTH 9 years ago |

Read this some where on some other forum, is this true?

> So yesterday someone found out that you can get any account banned if reports reach ~1000.

Is this somehow related?