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Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of Followers

nytimes.com

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Re: Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of Followers

#41

Post by spullara »

segmondy wrote: post #32
traskjd wrote: post #10

Kudos to twitter on this. This is one of those moves that harms them in the eyes of short term investors, but is The Right Thing To Do. I've always been astounded that nobody seems to notice that Facebook continually announces record users, record MAUs and then usually a week or two after their quarterly numbers announces that they have removing millions of fake accounts. Always after they've 'beaten' on those metric…

As a twitter user, it doesn't matter to me. I don't see these bots & fake users. What annoys me with all these platform is that that they choose what to show me. I wish to see all posts/tweets in the exact order it was created. That's it, don't decide who's I should see. Every once in a while, I'm shocked to come across someone I was following and havent' seen their tweet only to check their profile and see they have…

You can separately unfollow retweets from accounts that do that too much.

Re: Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of Followers

#42

Post by thestepafter »

segmondy wrote: post #32
traskjd wrote: post #10

Kudos to twitter on this. This is one of those moves that harms them in the eyes of short term investors, but is The Right Thing To Do. I've always been astounded that nobody seems to notice that Facebook continually announces record users, record MAUs and then usually a week or two after their quarterly numbers announces that they have removing millions of fake accounts. Always after they've 'beaten' on those metric…

As a twitter user, it doesn't matter to me. I don't see these bots & fake users. What annoys me with all these platform is that that they choose what to show me. I wish to see all posts/tweets in the exact order it was created. That's it, don't decide who's I should see. Every once in a while, I'm shocked to come across someone I was following and havent' seen their tweet only to check their profile and see they have…

This. The number of people I follow are in the low double digits. I follow them because they are industry leaders and it is how I keep up on the latest news and new technology in my field. The new algorithms are showing me tweets from days ago or just skipping tweets completely. There should be an option to see in order or by algorithms.

Re: Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of Followers

#43

Post by jackfoxy »

segmondy wrote: post #32
traskjd wrote: post #10

Kudos to twitter on this. This is one of those moves that harms them in the eyes of short term investors, but is The Right Thing To Do. I've always been astounded that nobody seems to notice that Facebook continually announces record users, record MAUs and then usually a week or two after their quarterly numbers announces that they have removing millions of fake accounts. Always after they've 'beaten' on those metric…

As a twitter user, it doesn't matter to me. I don't see these bots & fake users. What annoys me with all these platform is that that they choose what to show me. I wish to see all posts/tweets in the exact order it was created. That's it, don't decide who's I should see. Every once in a while, I'm shocked to come across someone I was following and havent' seen their tweet only to check their profile and see they have…

Exactly this.

My other beef with twitter is a more sophisticated way to filter my timeline. I mean something that would make sense to a programmer, not the typical user friendly useless thing.

Re: Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of Followers

#44

Post by bilbo0s »

segmondy wrote: post #32
traskjd wrote: post #10

Kudos to twitter on this. This is one of those moves that harms them in the eyes of short term investors, but is The Right Thing To Do. I've always been astounded that nobody seems to notice that Facebook continually announces record users, record MAUs and then usually a week or two after their quarterly numbers announces that they have removing millions of fake accounts. Always after they've 'beaten' on those metric…

As a twitter user, it doesn't matter to me. I don't see these bots & fake users. What annoys me with all these platform is that that they choose what to show me. I wish to see all posts/tweets in the exact order it was created. That's it, don't decide who's I should see. Every once in a while, I'm shocked to come across someone I was following and havent' seen their tweet only to check their profile and see they have…

"... I wish to see all posts/tweets in the exact order it was created ..."

Oh my, that definitely should be filed under: "Be Careful What You Wish For"

I suspect such a change as that would end up annoying the living you know what out of most every user on Twitter. They should let YOU configure YOUR OWN account to see everything. But I'd be really hesitant to do that for every account on Twitter by default. That just would not end well.

Re: Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of Followers

#45

Post by bostik »

traskjd wrote: post #10

Kudos to twitter on this. This is one of those moves that harms them in the eyes of short term investors, but is The Right Thing To Do. I've always been astounded that nobody seems to notice that Facebook continually announces record users, record MAUs and then usually a week or two after their quarterly numbers announces that they have removing millions of fake accounts. Always after they've 'beaten' on those metric…

> This is one of those moves that harms them in the eyes of short term investors, but is The Right Thing To Do.

[Cynic's hat on] And they can only do this now, having shown the ability to turn a profit.

Up until now, Twitter has been forced to operate in "growth for its own sake" mode. Investors keep myopically staring at user numbers, confident that there's a way to turn the faucet on, consistently and repeatedly tapping the userbase for pennies per person. The bot accounts don't make them money, so getting rid of them are likely to actually improve the bottom line.

But the sad fact is that until recently Twitter have been financially disincentivised from cracking down on fake accounts.

Re: Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of Followers

#46

Post by prolikewh0a »

the-pigeon wrote: post #4

I'm curious if this is a real crack down or they are just trying to act like it. All of the big social networks have tons of bot activity to the point that most likely the majority of their requests are from bots. If they actually stopped all bots activity it would tremendously hurt their user counts and thus their valuations.

I'm curious how many "suspicious" accounts will be real people simply expressing their views. Twitter does openly admit to censorship [0], so it's not exactly a wild thought.

[0] https://www.lgraham.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/4766f54d-...

Re: Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of Followers

#47

Post by mcny »

bilbo0s wrote: post #44
segmondy wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a twitter user, it doesn't matter to me. I don't see these bots & fake users. What annoys me with all these platform is that that they choose what to show me. I wish to see all posts/tweets in the exact order it was created. That's it, don't decide who's I should see. Every once in a while, I'm shocked to come across someone I was following and havent' seen their tweet only to check their profile and see they have…

"... I wish to see all posts/tweets in the exact order it was created ..." Oh my, that definitely should be filed under: "Be Careful What You Wish For" I suspect such a change as that would end up annoying the living you know what out of most every user on Twitter. They should let YOU configure YOUR OWN account to see everything. But I'd be really hesitant to do that for every account on Twitter by default. That just…

I'm OK with this being OPT IN, hidden behind three layers of warnings. I just want it to be an option.

Re: Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of Followers

#48

Post by kevinmchugh »

segmondy wrote: post #32
traskjd wrote: post #10

Kudos to twitter on this. This is one of those moves that harms them in the eyes of short term investors, but is The Right Thing To Do. I've always been astounded that nobody seems to notice that Facebook continually announces record users, record MAUs and then usually a week or two after their quarterly numbers announces that they have removing millions of fake accounts. Always after they've 'beaten' on those metric…

As a twitter user, it doesn't matter to me. I don't see these bots & fake users. What annoys me with all these platform is that that they choose what to show me. I wish to see all posts/tweets in the exact order it was created. That's it, don't decide who's I should see. Every once in a while, I'm shocked to come across someone I was following and havent' seen their tweet only to check their profile and see they have…

> I see tons of tweets from people I don't follow only because someone I followed retweeted it

This is the original, only purpose of retweets, going back to before it was officially supported and was done manually.

Showing tweets which have been liked by accounts you follow is a much worse behavior of the app. I like indiscriminately but tweet and retweet very seldomly. There's no feature to save and show appreciation for a tweet without boosting it to my followers.

Re: Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of Followers

#49

Post by qubax »

segmondy wrote: post #32
traskjd wrote: post #10

Kudos to twitter on this. This is one of those moves that harms them in the eyes of short term investors, but is The Right Thing To Do. I've always been astounded that nobody seems to notice that Facebook continually announces record users, record MAUs and then usually a week or two after their quarterly numbers announces that they have removing millions of fake accounts. Always after they've 'beaten' on those metric…

As a twitter user, it doesn't matter to me. I don't see these bots & fake users. What annoys me with all these platform is that that they choose what to show me. I wish to see all posts/tweets in the exact order it was created. That's it, don't decide who's I should see. Every once in a while, I'm shocked to come across someone I was following and havent' seen their tweet only to check their profile and see they have…

It's the way social media is going.

From google news to facebook to twitter to youtube, instead of seeing what you want to see, now you see what they want you to see.

Social media is now parlaying its giant audience into social engineering. Buckle up because it's going to be a rough ride.

Re: Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of Followers

#50

Post by basscomm »

spullara wrote: post #41
segmondy wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a twitter user, it doesn't matter to me. I don't see these bots & fake users. What annoys me with all these platform is that that they choose what to show me. I wish to see all posts/tweets in the exact order it was created. That's it, don't decide who's I should see. Every once in a while, I'm shocked to come across someone I was following and havent' seen their tweet only to check their profile and see they have…

You can separately unfollow retweets from accounts that do that too much.

You sure can, but you can't turn off seeing what people you follow liked (unless you use something like Tweetdeck or an app that doesn't support this 'feature'). I find that worse than retweets because a lot of people apparently use the 'like' button as a sort of read receipt and 'like' everything that shows up in their feed.
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