People living in places that have long, dark, cold, wet winters certainly appreciate the shit out of summer while it lasts.

>The bar for including javascript from other sites should be a high one

>but that's not how most developers think these days.

The decision to include third party javascript is sometimes not even up to developers these days.

"A deal has been signed with company X, put their widget on the site" is something I've now heard a few times.

Arguments about the third party code greatly increasing page load time, page size, introducing security vulnerabilities etc then fall on deaf ears. High developer turnover seems to co-occur in these environments.

>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.

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.

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.

>After filtering 1,000 tweets per query, I barely found 10-20 real human users.

I am kind of surprised the number of human users is so high. I know a lot of bloggers of various sizes. To the best of my knowledge virtually all of them have hooked up one of the available services to post on their behalf. They either spend a little time scheduling out their tweets for the next week/month then forget about twitter until their schedule runs dry OR they set something up to randomly pick from some pool of blog posts and spam links.

Either way they then essentially never go on twitter again once things are up and running. The whole thing is full of bots talking to each other.