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Twitter doesn't care about spam?

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Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#91

Post by PragmaticPulp »

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.

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

Same here. I suppose I could go find spam if I start clicking on every Tweet from a high-profile person and scroll to the bottom of the comments, but the spam isn't jumping out at me on a regular basis.

I suspect some people have a very low tolerance for any spam appearing anywhere on a platform, and will get easily triggered whenever it crosses their experience in any way. If you're consuming 100s or 1000s of Tweets and responses in a sitting and scrolling to the bottom of threads, eventually you're going to see something spam-like.

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#92

Post by ghaff »

nfriedly wrote: post #55

I mostly treat twitter as a write-only medium: if I want to share something with the world, I might write a tweet about it. There are a few exceptions - e.g. if there's a specific thing I want to know about, like "is service XYZ experiencing an outage?", I might check twitter. And, sure, if someone sends me DM or a link to a tweet, I'll go read it. But that's about it. I used to pay closer attention to the notificati…

If I don't post something. (Or if my company or someone else I know doesn't post something with my handle.) I pretty much get very little in the way of notifications.

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#93

Post by PragmaticPulp »

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.

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

Maybe this is the difference? Cryptocurrency attracts spammers and scammers at a rate far higher than other conversations.

Now that you mention it, the only time I recall seeing spam lately was when I read the comments on some cryptocurrency Tweets. I usually avoid cryptocurrency discussions on Twitter because the signal to noise ratio on those is so low anyway.

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#94

Post by paulpauper »

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.

they are probably not making any $ with this or else you would see the same sophistication that goes into this spam as you see with YouTube crypto spam.

These guys are not on their A game here.

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#95

Post by gojomo »

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…

Twitter's biggest external spam problems are:

• abuse of @-replies

• unsolicitied DMs

…which both grow with account size (& other forms of prominence, & certain topic-areas), so your anecdotal testimony that it's not in your feed doesn't do much to qualify or refute the magnitudes of others' problems.

Twitter's biggest internal spam problems are:

• Twitter's ads are repetitive, poorly-targeted crap

• Twitter does not provide reliable ways to disable their unwanted inserts – quickly ignoring any number of 'see less often' choices, and doing things like randomly reverting people from their chosen 'latest' to Twitter's algorithmic 'home' feed.

As fair definitions of 'spam' or even more generally 'harassment' include "continued unwanted interactions against expressed preferences", this means Twitter Inc is the biggest spammer/harasser on its own platform.

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#96

Post by paulpauper »

This is what happens when you outsource moderation to algos and temp workers. Try spamming HN or Reddit with crypto giveaway scams (or any other scam) and see how long you last. (Hint: not long). Algos help , but invariably smart spammers will evade them, hence the needs for humans. Twitter does not lose much business to spam. All they need is to keep most of it under check.

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#98

Post by ryanSrich »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #93
ryanSrich wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> To test this out, just Tweet something like “my Coinbase account isn’t working” Maybe this is the difference? Cryptocurrency attracts spammers and scammers at a rate far higher than other conversations. Now that you mention it, the only time I recall seeing spam lately was when I read the comments on some cryptocurrency Tweets. I usually avoid cryptocurrency discussions on Twitter because the signal to noise ratio…

This could be the case, but I suspect if you tweeted “how to reset my chase bank account password” you might get the same level of spam. I don’t think it’s only crypto, just amplified in crypto.

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#99

Post by stochaztic »

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…

Here's one way they do it that isn't documented or widely known: an account can get "searchbanned". While your account is searchbanned, your new tweets can't show up in other people's search results unless they follow you. There is no indication when you've been seachbanned or when the ban is lifted, and no documentation on its existence or how to get un-searchbanned. We know because we gather community input on a specific hashtag, and have gotten complaints that specific people's contributions weren't included, because they didn't show up in the search.

Interestingly, we had one person's account whose search results still showed searchbanned tweets. They would not show for that person if they logged out. We also could not find out why that person's account in particular could see them.

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#100

Post by riffic »

habi wrote: post #87
riffic wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> four letter dormant Twitter account You know at some point Twitter will just arbitrarily snatch your user name up and assign your account a randomly generated sequence. It's been done before without a given explanation. Just keep that in the back of your mind.

How? I'm still 'using' the account for likes and reading stuff from friends, just don't post anything myself.

They'll still take the username out from underneath of you if they so choose. It's been done before.

one example: https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitter/comments/lbv0eo/twitter_use...

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