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Twitter Takes Aim at Anonymous Egg Accounts

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Re: Twitter Takes Aim at Anonymous Egg Accounts

#101

Post by CharlesW »

teej wrote: post #95
Grollicus wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"500.000 new Members last month!!1" (I just totally made that up) I suspect its the same as facebooks "2 Billion Users" - its just good for PR to have huge numbers. If you look too closely you might even lose Members in a Month, and we all know "growth" is very important..

Facebook and I believe Twitter report Monthly Active Users. This isn't some smoke and mirrors number. Sure, bots may count in this number, but they aren't referencing total signups when they say "Users" like you imply.

> This isn't some smoke and mirrors number. Sure, bots may count in this number…

They do, which is why it's reasonable to consider it a smoke and mirrors number.

Re: Twitter Takes Aim at Anonymous Egg Accounts

#102

Post by epistasis »

iamatworknow wrote: post #98
mikeyouse wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, but I definitely have -- it's unbelievably annoying to deal with. I had tweeted something pretty innocuous to a journalist after the election. I wasn't screaming about an illegitimate president or anything of the sort, it was something like, "Maybe we should look at adding more members of congress, it would smooth out the electoral college and make for better representation." Several months later, some random…

>Twitter was basically unusable for a week afterwards. Can you imagine that shit all the time? I can't, because in such a situation I would just delete my account. Spending your time responding to or blocking and reporting all of them would be maddening, for sure, but that is what gives them their "power". It's easier to click only one or two buttons and just be done with it all. Let them have their little victory. D…

Giving up an identity, followers, and communication streams and starting from scratch is giving them a full victory, not a "little victory," that's their entire goal, the big deal. Sometimes the right thing to do, but it seems rude to give it as blanket advice.

Re: Twitter Takes Aim at Anonymous Egg Accounts

#103

Post by taytus »

jaredhansen wrote: post #99
taytus wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Why Twitter ignores the crap which pollutes their product", this is easy to answer. Investors. Investors who don't care about nothing but vanity metrics, investors who don't make CEOs accountable. This is why, twitter is not the exception.

Sorry, but this explanation makes no sense. $TWTR has been a public company since 2013, with investors who emphatically do care about things other than vanity metrics. A list of the largest Twitter shareholders[1] includes Blackrock, Vanguard, Fidelity, Morgan Stanley etc. These folks really don't care about "engagement metrics", except as proxies for revenue. This argument can hold for earlier-stage companies with i…

Twitter was a private company at some point right? This is something that should have been fixed years ago.

Re: Twitter Takes Aim at Anonymous Egg Accounts

#104

Post by cdelsolar »

snissn wrote: post #94

Just got this today: Good day there! How are you today? I am a girl who just moved to live in this city! I have done a search on Twitter to look for man in our area and yeah I found your Twitter. In case you don't mind we can make friend and chat chit! Do you have snapchat? Please add me on Snapchat nick: [redacted] so we will chat and I can show you my personal photos! I don't like to chitchat here:) It's boring! Le…

I mean maybe she just found you really appealing.

Re: Twitter Takes Aim at Anonymous Egg Accounts

#105

Post by Balgair »

Grollicus wrote: post #72
notadoc wrote: post #47

There are massive bot farms on Twitter that are obvious to even casual observers and most of them don't have "egg" accounts anymore. Look at the auto-replies to any political tweet, major news story, or from a popular account, all automated garbage that follows the same template. Why Twitter ignores the crap which pollutes their product is amazing to me. Maybe they don't want to touch them because it ups the engageme…

"500.000 new Members last month!!1" (I just totally made that up) I suspect its the same as facebooks "2 Billion Users" - its just good for PR to have huge numbers. If you look too closely you might even lose Members in a Month, and we all know "growth" is very important..

You know, I could see ol' Zuck sitting there in his Herman-Miller Aeron chair looking at the internal numbers of FB 'users' and seeing the number be ~15 billion accounts that their in-house 'bot filters still think are 'real' people. He says to himself: 'You know, maybe I could tell the UN that there really are 15 billion people out there and they are all on FB. Ha, I mean, a lot of people really might believe me.' He looks out the window, sighs, and puts out an email via Thunderbird to the marketing team leads that says to keep the number at 2 billion.

Re: Twitter Takes Aim at Anonymous Egg Accounts

#106

Post by snissn »

cdelsolar wrote: post #104
snissn wrote: post #94

Just got this today: Good day there! How are you today? I am a girl who just moved to live in this city! I have done a search on Twitter to look for man in our area and yeah I found your Twitter. In case you don't mind we can make friend and chat chit! Do you have snapchat? Please add me on Snapchat nick: [redacted] so we will chat and I can show you my personal photos! I don't like to chitchat here:) It's boring! Le…

I mean maybe she just found you really appealing.

Aw shucks, you think? Thanks :)

Re: Twitter Takes Aim at Anonymous Egg Accounts

#107

Post by johnnyhillbilly »

rhizome wrote: post #78
usrusr wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except when Twitter makes that a heuristic for detecting bots, then they'll soon stop tweeting the same text twice.

Quants have ruled the business landscape for long enough, bring on the Quals.

Hear, hear!

With quantitative analytics being used and abused by ever more businesses, the advantage will go to those that can apply qualitative checks to their assumptions - and scale it.

Re: Twitter Takes Aim at Anonymous Egg Accounts

#108

Post by Drumlin »

xadhominemx wrote: post #61
jsonne wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a good example of how optimizing for the power user, at a large scale, can actually be detrimental.

How do you know that? The changes have not yet taken effect.

One of the main problems with Twitter is people sign up and don't know what to do with it - except message famous people. If Twitter prevents the plebs from shouting at the intelligentsia then it will make the platform even more irrelevant. The last time I used it, it was like talking into a void and that was with hundreds of real followers.

Re: Twitter Takes Aim at Anonymous Egg Accounts

#109

Post by ceejayoz »

slig wrote: post #81
mod wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, he's saying people by-and-large can't defeat Gmail's spam detection. The same will likely happen at twitter.

> The same will likely happen at twitter. It took them years to let users upload images (when there was a clear demand and parasite services grew out of this) and there's obvious spam accounts that could've shadow banned with very simple heuristics. So I don't think this is going to happen.

I suspect their spam/abuse trouble started getting a bit more attention after Disney dropped an acquisition over it in October.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-17/disney-sa...

Re: Twitter Takes Aim at Anonymous Egg Accounts

#110

Post by liquidise »

eropple wrote: post #62
intoverflow2 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> including "automatically block accounts under X days old that @ me" How can a new user (who isn't a harasser) engage with the Twitter service if they get auto-blocked when they try to engage with anyone on the platform?

Personally? I interact with people I know, not #brands. And I do that by following, not by @'ing out of the blue. Everybody I know does the same. If somebody with a name I recognize follows me, I'm gonna follow them back and @'ing is fine.

What you are describing is a tinder approach to twitter, which serve fundamentally different roles in the online social sphere. I understand that is how you and yours use twitter, but extrapolating that behavior across hundreds of millions of users is almost certainly hasty.
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