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Twitter doesn't care about spam?

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Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#31

Post by ryanSrich »

jsnell wrote: 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…

Crazy how we can have such different experiences. I follow less than 100 accounts and easily 50% of the responses are always spam/scams. It makes Twitter almost unusable for me.

The most ironic part is that Twitter will show the spam/scams, but hide other replies, from real people, that Twitter thinks are mean.

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#32

Post by ryanSrich »

jonas21 wrote: post #19
jsnell wrote: 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…

Option E: Nobody can even agree on what Twitter spam is. Is it bots? I follow a few bot accounts and get value out of them. Is it blatantly promotional content? This actually seems to be one of the intended uses of Twitter. Is it low-quality content? I feel like lots of people earnestly tweet out low-quality stuff, and who gets to judge what's low-quality anyway?

To me it’s the fake accounts impersonating a real company with direct links to malicious websites. These responses always get 100s of likes from other bots, and also dozens of replies from other fake bots to make it seem real.

To test this out, just Tweet something like “my Coinbase account isn’t working”

You’ll get dozens of replies from fake Coinbase support scams.

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#35

Post by loceng »

aeternum wrote: post #25
loceng wrote: 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.

Makes me wonder how the leadership is financially aligned with allowing it.

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#36

Post by 3pt14159 »

jsnell wrote: 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…

(Like always, speaking just for myself here)

The spam Twitter lets through is ridiculous. Is it hard to catch all offenders? Yes. Is it obvious Twitter is no where close to that? Also yes. We should have higher standards for our social networks.

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#38

Post by winternett »

Twitter also doesn't care about community and users because all they care about now is year over year profit, which is helped by maintaining the "hopeless poster" situation that exists now. most of the live accounts are probably not logged in, the site is fraught with dead accounts and bots. Trending topics are regularly either bought or spammed to the top.

The real-time news factor of Twitter is delayed and corrupted from all of the bot and misinformation activity that is rampant on the platform, and there's really no organic way left to grow an audience left beyond announcing your twitter handle on TV or bootlegging your way up there.

It's pretty grim. Even many verified accounts, with hundreds of thousands of followers+, are tweeting automated tweets daily to an audience of bot followers because of the dysfunction, and many people like me loathe logging in because the experience is utterly soul destroying. The ball was totally dropped on one of the Internet's greatest tools.

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