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Twitter doesn't care about spam?

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111–120 of 192 posts

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#111
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

ActivityPub is awesome. I hear a lot of criticisms lobbed towards it (some valid, some pointless), but the idea of federation for a feed-based social network just makes so much sense once you start using it. People who like to hide away and form small circles of friends are given the tools they need to do so. Social butterflies who like to follow thousands of people from hundreds of instances can do as they please.

There's also so much room to expand. I'd personally love to see a Disqus implementation that uses ActivityPub identifiers to post comments.

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#113
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Could it be that you are perhaps unaware of what is a cleverly veiled spam reply or a scam reply? Lots look conversational, even genuine. You only have to mention NFTs, even in a negative light, and you generally get drive-by likes from verified NFT-related accounts, and if you check their 'Likes', they've liked dozens more tweets since yours. The idea being to draw attention to itself with a certain demographic. Twi…

>You only have to mention NFTs, even in a negative light,

Play stupid games win stupid prizes?

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#115
post #30

Instagram is also terrible with spam. I often see spam comments that are voted up by dozens/hundreds of spam accounts.

It’s funny, I see that too but they’re never actually the highest ranked comment in the feed order. Rather, they’re always like 40 comments deep in the comment feed surrounded by 1-2 like comments. So IG must strongly suspect they’re spam, but don’t block outright due to the risk of fallout from false positives.

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#116
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On your account perhaps, because you don't follow the same people I do... Not on my 2, and for many friends I know. Try muting "BTS" The (K-Pop group) as an example.

I think there's a minimum character count for mute to work. My mute list includes "NFT" and "NFTs" and yet plenty of tweets get through. However, other mute words that are longer and not acronyms, will be filtered out as requested.

generally that would indicate that the feature needs an update to address the issue...

But it's rather convenient for the platform to not do that update if it circumvented their profit making interests, and the interests of the other paying entities (like corps and celebrities) that need to promote things that could be otherwise muted for the comfort of their entire user community.

Sure, it's not always a conspiracy theory as someone will likely comment, but in this case, the evidence is clear as daylight.

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#117
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 sp…

Hey, I work on Twitter's search team.

This sounds like a bug we're aware of where an account that goes public -> private we'll reliably purge their tweets from the public index, but if an account goes private -> public sometimes we'll not re-populate the main index correctly.

> we had one person's account whose search results still showed searchbanned tweets

This part doesn't match what I'm describing, but could be explained by the logged in account having access to private tweets in search results that logged out / other accounts do not.

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#118
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=...

"Leopards are eating my face!" says Elon, apparently lacking the self-awareness necessary to realize that he's largely responsible for the crypto spammers and NFT craze in the first place. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1371549960030842893 He seems to not realize the impact of having 70M followers. It's not a WhatsApp group chat, Elon.

Your tweet reference was him trolling. And he obviously does understand his reach, you saying that isn't a proof point.

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#119

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 corrupte…

100% agree. Twitter seems to have an outsized cultural influence but is dead or dysfunctional in so many ways.

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#120
post #59

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.

Just tweet the word “metamask” in any context and instantly get three replies from bots trying to scam you.

There’s a ton of stuff like this.

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