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Twitter doesn't care about spam?

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Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#21
post #9

Option d: nobody outside of the Twitter TnS teams (including Paul Graham) has any idea of what Twitter is detecting as spam and what not, and thus can't actually judge how good a job is being done. First, we don't see the spam that was outright blocked, so we have no idea of what the false negative rate is. Second, I bet that this is not a binary block/allow decision, but there are all kinds of ways of reducing the e…

I see lots of spammy content from startup founders, but there is clearly (or maybe bots are better than I think) a human behind it as it appropriately replies to stuff and appropriately piggy backs off trends.

I’ve known a few startups that built their initial user bases utterly deluging Reddit and Twitter in manual spam.

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#22

in the thread, someone links PG's filtering method, which claims 99.5% effectiveness? that would still be getting me 20+ spam emails a day at that rate further, if you are trying to block, lets say, crypto scams, on a platform which allows strong positive discussion about crypto, which allows people to talk about stuff they are selling for crypto, etc etc etc, you easily start losing points to differentiate the defen…

This is a good place to start - http://paulgraham.com/spam.html

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#23
Twitter's a company with such a strange relationship with the users of its own site.

I modded /r/Twitter on reddit for a year but burned myself out (I chose to de-moderate FYI) simply because Twitter doesn't care about its community or even recognizing the existence of the community that developed around trying to provide the support the company won't provide on its own. Perhaps my take is cynical, but I really do like the concepts of a social media service like Twitter. The execution of it, however?

Perhaps this is an outsider's perspective but it seems people who work for Twitter would rather pat themselves on the back rather than make improvements.

My complaint of the week - you can't say the words "hacked" and "account" without having scambots asking you to get in touch with "their friend" who will help you restore access to your account. or something. It's just a fucking scam.

Also, just look at threads in reddit flagged with the Bug Report, Complaints, or even Question flair. The users are just bewildered and the experience is 100% user-hostile:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitter/search?q=flair%3ABug%2BRepo...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitter/search?q=flair%3ACOMPLAINTS...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitter/search?q=flair%3AQuestion&r...

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#24

I wonder if spam bots count in their monetizable daily active users count that Wall street looks for every quarter. Would sure explain a lot.

Does Wall Street still care about theoretically monetizable metrics like DAU from Twitter? I would think Wall Street is probably expecting real revenue and profit by now.

Twitter tracks “monetizable Daily Active Users”, which are those that they can show ads (or subscribe to Twitter Blue).

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#25
post #3

Relevant tweet from Elon Musk yesterday: "Twitter is spending engineering resources on this bs [support for profile photo from NFT] while crypto scammers are throwing a spambot block party in every thread!?" - https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1484456594775678976?cxt=...

Yes, it's especially apparent when most of the spam is coming from names that are only a few unicode characters away like El0n Musk. Ridiculous that twitter can't flag that kind of thing.
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