Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Twitter doesn't care about spam?

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 192 posts

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#121

Post by hammyhavoc »

scantron4 wrote: post #113
hammyhavoc wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don't know if mentioning getting locked out of an account and getting inundated with copy-paster recommendations of users who can help you/regain access/"hack" it so they can steal it is playing a stupid game or just a lack of Twitter caring. I can give literally hundreds of examples, all of which I've reported numerous times for years on end.

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#122

Post by stochaztic »

robinson-wall wrote: post #117
stochaztic wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

Due to both the second part, and that of the 7 accounts that we know this happened to, they messaged us just hours after tweeting that we weren't picking up their tweets, it doesn't sound like a match. The logged-in account also had no history with the accounts in question; we were actively in a call at the same time trying to figure out why that person could see tweets the others couldn't. I'd be happy to discuss details and specific tweets if you want.

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#123

Post by dgellow »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #27

The new flood of cryptocurrency and NFT scams has really made my Twitter spam problem worse. Meanwhile Twitter is endorsing NFTs with UI features.

You can block words, such as NFT or crypto, by going to your user settings. I would recommend everybody to use this feature a lot to avoid stress and content that makes the angry, it’s quite helpful.

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#124

Post by riffic »

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.

shadowbanning. Twitter says they don't shadowban[0] but they absolutely do if you tweet things that trigger their sentiment analysis algorithms:

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitter/comments/p1ggm4/rtwitter_at...

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#125

Post by robinson-wall »

stochaztic wrote: post #122
robinson-wall wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

Due to both the second part, and that of the 7 accounts that we know this happened to, they messaged us just hours after tweeting that we weren't picking up their tweets, it doesn't sound like a match. The logged-in account also had no history with the accounts in question; we were actively in a call at the same time trying to figure out why that person could see tweets the others couldn't. I'd be happy to discuss de…

Happy to take a look (next week, realistically, as I'm UK based) - you can dm me twitter.com/nickrw

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#126

Post by fleddr »

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…

We can judge it just fine as it's plain to see.

Take an account that attracts bots, Elon Musk is one of many examples. What do we see...

a) Hundreds of replies in the very first few seconds. It's humanly impossible to post this fast.

b) Replies share the exact same profile photo, typically of a well known original account.

c) User names are all a slight misspelling of a well known original account.

d) What they post is repetitive, same spam links and texts.

Every single pattern above, as well as combinations of them, are absolutely trivial to detect. But absolutely nothing is done about it.

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#128

Post by riffic »

hammyhavoc wrote: post #121
scantron4 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You only have to mention NFTs, even in a negative light, Play stupid games win stupid prizes?

I don't know if mentioning getting locked out of an account and getting inundated with copy-paster recommendations of users who can help you/regain access/"hack" it so they can steal it is playing a stupid game or just a lack of Twitter caring. I can give literally hundreds of examples, all of which I've reported numerous times for years on end.

Hello dear, I recommend you to message my friend on lnstagram I just recovered my account that was hacked with his help! /s

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#129

Post by paulpauper »

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.

if depends who and what you follow. crypto always has tons of spam

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#130

Post by paulpauper »

lkbm wrote: post #69
stevage wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

a few people hit elon twitter hard with spam, made craploads of $ from it
Post reply on HN