Twitter doesn't care about spam? • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#131

Post by paulpauper » Fri, Jan 28, 2022, 10:08 PM UTC

duskwuff wrote: post #74

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.

"Metamask" is pretty effective, but it only gets better if you combine it with a bunch of other triggers. I've seen some people deliberately craft tweets to get all of the bots to show up at once, e.g. > metamask trust wallet support seed phrase recovery bitcoin shib ethereum network nft help moon coinbase defi dapp shib dogecoin giveaway retweet elon musk free nfts crypto punks opensea free raffle dao hacked banned…

it can help your tweet rank higher

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#132

Post by beebmam » Fri, Jan 28, 2022, 10:10 PM UTC

I personally think spam is speech, and it should be protected speech. I'm not a fan of spam being censored on social media. People should be able to say as much as they want on the internet

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#133

Post by bhauer » Fri, Jan 28, 2022, 10:18 PM UTC

gojomo wrote: post #95

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…

> Twitter does not provide reliable ways to disable their unwanted inserts

Indeed. I'd argue that the "Who to Follow" insert is worse than any spam I have seen or deal with.

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#134

Post by hammyhavoc » Fri, Jan 28, 2022, 10:21 PM UTC

riffic wrote: post #128

hammyhavoc wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Shoot me!

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#135

Post by draugadrotten » Fri, Jan 28, 2022, 10:24 PM UTC

beebmam wrote: post #132

I personally think spam is speech, and it should be protected speech. I'm not a fan of spam being censored on social media. People should be able to say as much as they want on the internet

Sure. Spammers are free to say what they want. However they are not entitled to being part of my twitter feed, my inbox or my network packets. Those are mine to filter as I see fit. That applies to everyone's speech.

Your claim that spam is speech is flawed. Free speech is a concept how to protect genuine ideas, not how to enable more advertising. When one talks about "speech" we do not literally refer to the spoken word, nor does "speech" mean any combination of words out there. The term "free speech" is a term for opinions and ideas, plain and simple.

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#136

Post by imgabe » Fri, Jan 28, 2022, 10:26 PM UTC

rchaud wrote: post #103

Cederfjard wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

These days, anything crypto/"web3"/blockchain related will have spam/scam shills in the comment threads. Besides that, famous tech people's tweets, like Elon Musk's, are a good camping spot for those accounts. Lots of eyeballs on those threads.

Yep, I made a joke about buying the dip and pretty much immediately got a spam reply from some account shilling a crypto newsletter or something.

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#137

Post by imgabe » Fri, Jan 28, 2022, 10:28 PM UTC

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…

The spam doesn’t show up in your feed, it comes in the replies. If you’re a large account like pg you’re probably getting a ton of spam replies to every tweet.

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#138

Post by jzwinck » Fri, Jan 28, 2022, 10:35 PM UTC

Someone I know well was hired at Twitter more than a decade ago as a senior software engineer. He had experience with natural language processing, and was given a project to identify spam and bot accounts.

He worked on this for a while, all the data he needed was made available and he analyzed every account on Twitter. His analysis said one third of all accounts were bots.

He presented these results to management, who said the number must not be that high, and discussed what it would mean for their MAUs or whatever metrics if these accounts were removed.

None of the identified accounts were deleted. Instead, the project to identify them was canceled, and the engineer quit.

More accounts means more money. Follow the money.

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#139

Post by riffic » Fri, Jan 28, 2022, 10:35 PM UTC

hammyhavoc wrote: post #134

riffic wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Shoot me!

you've been permanently suspended by Twitter for promoting self-harm and glorifying violence.

Re: Twitter doesn't care about spam?

#140

Post by tekacs » Fri, Jan 28, 2022, 10:36 PM UTC

slimsag wrote: post #7

..I think they intend to "fix it" by making people's interactions on Twitter more narrow. They don't truly like the fact that Twitter is a bunch of popular people shouting into the void, they want to bring Twitter 'closer' to something like Facebook (but not exactly) where you are interacting with a closed loop of friends in order to engage more every-day (read: less popular) people. Anyone who has created an account…

> Anyone who has created an account on Twitter in recent years knows that new accounts are indiscriminately opted into new mandatory 'intelligent' social features like the purple star recommendations[0], while anyone with an old account will never see such a thing.

Hmm I have an old account (Sep 2007) that sees purple star recommendations…