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Twitter doesn't care about spam?

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Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#61

Post by jsheard »

metadat wrote: post #16
jonathan-adly wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just tweet metamask lol - its the magic word. Edit: WARNING this will immediately fill your feed with spam. Don't click anything that you get.

Huh? Can you explain this one, please?

Metamask is a crypto wallet manager, and often people mention it in Tweets because they're having some kind of problem using it, so spambots reply with links to fake "Metamask support" pages that helpfully guide you through the process of handing your private keys over to someone who will immediately steal all your bitcoins and monkey JPEGs. That particular type of spam has been around for a while now so people must still be falling for it.

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#62

Post by pmarreck »

jonathan-adly wrote: post #13
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…

Just tweet metamask lol - its the magic word. Edit: WARNING this will immediately fill your feed with spam. Don't click anything that you get.

Seems like a perfect honeypot candidate

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#63

Post by Cederfjard »

ryanSrich wrote: post #31
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.

I’m curious what kind of accounts you follow? I follow mostly American political pundits, journalists and lawyers, and I very rarely see spam.

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#64

Post by habi »

I have a four letter dormant Twitter account. I get about four mentions/replies per day that link to some nondescript crypto airdrop since several weeks. I manually mark each and every such tweet as spam and block the user, which needs 5 clicks or so. Nothing seems to help.

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#65

Post by pmarreck »

ALittleLight wrote: post #58

Twitter is also incredibly bad at identifying offensive Tweets - https://inteoryx.com/htmls/TwitterOffensive.html

What is universally or objectively "offensive"? Is a young attractive woman who is only following me to try to get me to follow her OnlyFans, "offensive"? Is a die-hard materialist atheist, or a strident born-again Christian "protected by the vaccine of God", "offensive"? Is plain nudity "offensive"? Violent photos or movies? Vanilla sex? Hardcore sex? BDSM sex? Bad words? (Bad word filters are easily defeated with creative misspellings or Unicode.)

Is being mean "offensive"? How would you detect that well? The more intelligent the meanness, the harder it would probably be to detect...

Are certain thoughts or concepts offensive? Are they ALWAYS offensive (across both time and location on the Earth), or only for the time being, or only for a place?

Is the word "Jews" offensive? Always, or depending on context or who is saying it?

Is it possible to be satirically offensive in a way that an algorithm would have difficulty detecting? What if I quoted something offensive to argue against it? (I literally got a tempban for this once.)

Perhaps they are "incredibly bad" at it because it is an algorithmically impossible problem that is deeply tied into the subjective sensibilities and tastes of a perceiving consciousness at one point in time (or set of consciousnesses, all of which perhaps only accidentally happen to coincide)

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#66

Post by wizzwizz4 »

riffic wrote: post #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 li…

> Perhaps my take is cynical, but I really do like the concepts of a social media service like Twitter. The execution of it, however?

Have you heard of Mastodon? https://joinmastodon.org. If so, how do you think it compares?

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#67

Post by riffic »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #66
riffic wrote: post #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 li…

> Perhaps my take is cynical, but I really do like the concepts of a social media service like Twitter. The execution of it, however? Have you heard of Mastodon? https://joinmastodon.org . If so, how do you think it compares?

Mastodon's wonderful and Twitter (or anyone, really) should acquihire Eugen Rochko.

If you're going to do the Steve Jobs thing and skate where the puck is going, you should be skating in the direction of ActivityPub. Definitely not in the direction of web3.

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#69

Post by lkbm »

stevage wrote: post #59
ryanSrich wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I follow around 1000. I see almost zero spam. This whole thread is pretty confusing to me.

Every Elon Musk tweet is (or was a while back) filled with spam replies, but I don't recall seeing much outside of that.

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#70

Post by [deleted] »

ryanSrich wrote: post #32
jonas21 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]
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