CryptoDeleted, Alive and Well
CryptoDeletedI had few different title ideas for this article such as “how to compensate for your receding hairline by growing a big beard” and few other, but I decided to keep it simple.
I felt I should answer Lopp, I was going to ignore and get back to my code but I think it would be a good thing to give the other side of the story. Because Lopp very conveniently omitted some facts in his blog where he paints himself as a CypherPunk Knight.
The first thing that Lopp refused to mention in any of his articles or on Twiter is that CryptoDeleted is alive and well on telegram. Note that this channel is only used for the bot to post deleted tweets (and sometimes some comments).
Today we also created a public group where everyone is free to come discuss. Last time we did this, Peter came in with his band to flood the channel, so it will probably be a mess but so be it.
Good luck suspending that.
Terms of Service Violations
In his blog post, he gave us some quote that sound straight from the Twitter thought police:
The owner of the deleted tweets bot broke their agreement with Twitter, so Twitter removed their account. That’s the TL;DR of this saga.
This is a violation of section I. B. 5. of the Twitter Developer Policy which states:
Do not exceed or circumvent limitations on access, calls, sharing, privacy settings, or use permitted in this Policy, or as otherwise set forth on the Developer Site, or communicated to you by Twitter.
But he omitted the fact that he also broke the Twitter rules several time, more specifically the rules about spamming and automated replies. As he admitted, he made a ‘griefing” bot in order to spam CryptoDeleted.
This was his first attempt at griefing, which failed:
According to Lopp, CryptoDeleted code is “naive”. Well… I don’t know how naive was that bot, it should have been 10 lines of code and it took me 1 line to block it. Note that Lopp only ran this bot once, then published his blog post shortly after (seems like the blog post was mostly written before he even ran the bot).
After that fail, he decided he needed help. So he wrote his first blog article and asked people interested to join the fight to write him an email. And I was definitely interested. Because according to Lopp, this is all about making CryptoDeleted better, we need to test it so I can improve it, fine. I wrote an email to Lopp from my email address “jcho710@protonmail.com” (lol).
A day after, Lopp took the bait, thanked Jonathan for participating and gave him a link to his Twitter app to register for the griefing:
https://www.lopp.net/tweetbot/authorize.php
When the link and email got tweeted by CryptoDeleted, he quickly moved it somewhere else.
After the second griefing attempt, we learned that the following people gave access to their Twitter account to Lopp through his Twitter bot:
The second bot was less dumb, it was copying previous tweets that these people made and tweeted them again on their account as a reply to account with 0 followers. Again, breaking Twitter rules and this time getting all these big account to do it (and possibly they all gave access to their DMs to lopp?). The reason Lopp made it do replies only is because it is more stealthy as it doesn’t show on the main timeline of these people.
Example:
Several people on Twitter mentioned that they were reporting these accounts when they were spamming. But it seems the rules don’t apply equally to everyone? Shocker.
One could think that this is a rather strange way to help make CryptoDeleted a better bot right? I could think of few other and better ways :
- Make a donation
- Make your own bot
- Simply make suggestions / Reach in DM
- Help with the code (Remember, according to Lopp, he’s a cypherpunk because he codes)
- STFU because who cares
The Triggering
Of course, this is just an excuse and Lopp never cared about making CryptoDeleted better. If he really wanted to “stress test” the bot or “play a game… adversarially”, he would have ran his bot all the time. But he only ran it 2 times, and wrote a blog post about it each times.
In my opinion this is all about attention and engagement. Lopp is not a cypherpunk, he’s a salesman and cypherpunk is his trademark (look at his website, he advertises himself as cypherpunk everywhere). His tweets about CryptoDeleted did pretty good engagement wise, and Lopp has things to sell (or resell, like hardware wallets, INX tokens etc) so it’s important to him.
Of course there’s also a bit of triggering, which is mostly true for the other people that helped him I think. Peter The Deleter got caught several times deleting tweets which earned him the name and later got into a mental breakdown and tweeted he will leave Twitter then came back 5 hours later.
Samson got the whole gym friend thing + his girlfriend got caught deleting tweets like “Samson is a good guy”. Moreover I can imagine that Poloniex, Coindesk, Kraken, Bitmex, CZ and much more other, who all got caught deleting tweets, some more embarrassing than other were also not very happy about it.
Community Driven
This was always a free and community driven project. Some of the critics argued that CryptoDeleted was getting too personal. Those who followed the account remember that the account was always following poll results. It asked if it should keep or remove this or that person, if it should keep commenting or sticking to deleted tweet. The community decided to keep most people and that they wanted comments on the posts. Of course, the people being followed didn’t like it. In fact I believe they were more triggered by the comments then by the deleted tweets. At it’s peek, CryptoDeleted was getting millions of engagements and most comments were earning more engagement than the tweets of the people being followed even though they had 10x more (dead) followers (AKA ratio’d).
What’s next
Lopp is going to be happy! CryptoDeleted is actually getting better and receiving more support than before. The code has already been improved for the last few days. We’re aware or some “flaw” in the bot that result in not all tweets being caught and this will be the first improvement.
Other than that, there are some discussions about a potential website that would imitate Twitter UI and where you could follow your own list of people and get their deleted tweets.
Finally, because we all love muh blockchain, we are considering putting all deleted tweets on chain. We are not sure where for now, but we are considering Twetch and/or Dragonchain.
If you want to support CryptoDeleted, feel free to make a donation:
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