I have completely ignored Twitter since some guy told me about it 10 years ago, and I have not once thought "wow, I wish I had paid more attention to that."
This isn't a matter of personal-access only:
Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts
111–120 of 173 posts
Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts
#112It's so obvious that social platforms with business models based on number of ads/impressions like Twitter/FB are not incentivized enough to remove fake accounts, yet there seems to be very little public discussion or outrage about it. I agree with Mark Cuban here [1], they should do more to make sure each account has a real user behind it, even if it means less revenue. It's just the right thing to do. [1] https://t…
Is a brand considered a "real name and real person"?
In most legislations, a brand is considered a "legal person". (which is hilarious when you register your company as forms kind of treat the company as if it were a person)
Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts
#113Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts
#114Twitter is in a dire situation. As a fun project I wrote a Lua - Torch bot to search for certain tweets and hit like on them based on sentiment analysis. I realized that API query results were mostly news bots, retweet bots, corporate PR bots, social media aggregator platforms like Buffer, and just plain old spam bots. How bad was it? After filtering 1,000 tweets per query, I barely found 10-20 real human users. That…
I have spent several years working on a product (https://www.rapidcrowd.co) that cuts through the noise (bots, fake accounts, inactives) of Twitter to find real users that fit related topics - and your rough estimate of 20 real users in 1000 tweets isn't too far off.
For this reason, trending topics and keyword search are essentially hijacked features.
However, because I believe there are many useful bots that have organic followings in the millions - I don't believe they need to be simply removed from the ecosystem.
Instead, my suggestion would be a 'bots' account type. Some ideas:
- A robot version of the 'blue checkmark'. This would allow users to quickly identify a tweet as sent from a bot.
- This account type could be linked to a real owners account, much like Twitter apps are. Accounts flagged and failed to register as a bot could be subject to deletion.
- Bots would automatically receive low ranking in search queries, and trending topics. Perhaps they would be completely delisted.
- Bots cannot follow other users.
- Bots cannot tweet at* other users.
More extreme:
- Bots cannot tweet without some sort of spend. Maybe they can only tweet in some ratio from real Likes they receive. This is a bit extreme, but would mitigate a lot of problems.
I really believe a happy median could be found - and currently think that a well-curated Twitter timeline is amazing, but as I stated search results and trending topics are completely broken.
Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most on porn sites is, though.
Most on the internet too. Every image meme and reuploads of other images are basically also copyright violations.
This doesn't mean a company Tumblr's size can ignore it. Reddit, Google, Facebook, et al all need to consider these things as they operate.
I'm not saying they can't skirt the laws a little bit and get away with it, all I'm saying is they need to have awareness.
Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts
#116Twitter is in a dire situation. As a fun project I wrote a Lua - Torch bot to search for certain tweets and hit like on them based on sentiment analysis. I realized that API query results were mostly news bots, retweet bots, corporate PR bots, social media aggregator platforms like Buffer, and just plain old spam bots. How bad was it? After filtering 1,000 tweets per query, I barely found 10-20 real human users. That…
The trick with Twitter is that basically these bots are invisible unless you search hashtags or read the replies to a popular person who is spammed by them. It's not like anybody sane would follow these bots. Twitter's model is basically "shouting at the universe" but if nobody listens it doesn't matter.
Problem being investors do listen to these metrics and nobody really knows how bad the noise is in that data being shared.
I 100% guarantee twitter knows the exact ratio of real to unreal users and their content.
They're also trying to slowly crack down on bots.
A year ago they insta locked your account if it looked like automated liking of content.
Now they're insta locking if you look like a follow/unfollow bot.
Its a balancing act and I feel like its analogous to getting out of extreme debt. They're trying to replace bots as their real user base grows internally.
Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts
#117Twitter is in a dire situation. As a fun project I wrote a Lua - Torch bot to search for certain tweets and hit like on them based on sentiment analysis. I realized that API query results were mostly news bots, retweet bots, corporate PR bots, social media aggregator platforms like Buffer, and just plain old spam bots. How bad was it? After filtering 1,000 tweets per query, I barely found 10-20 real human users. That…
I have spent several years working on a product ( https://www.rapidcrowd.co ) that cuts through the noise (bots, fake accounts, inactives) of Twitter to find real users that fit related topics - and your rough estimate of 20 real users in 1000 tweets isn't too far off. For this reason, trending topics and keyword search are essentially hijacked features. However, because I believe there are many useful bots that have…
When I first joined Twitter a few years ago I tried the ‘search near me’ feature a few times.
Weather bots. For any city within 100 miles of where I am. Plus bots posting job listings. Plus companies posting those same job listings.
There was basically no signal to find, it was all noise. The few ‘legitimate’ ones I found were from local PD/FD.
I think they just need to ban all bots/automated postings. Or make them filters le and require a $100/mo account and $1/tweet. Something to discourage the absolute garbage.
Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts
#118Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I last checked my google ad profile (and this was a while ago; now it contains a lot less info probably because I opted out of a bunch of stuff), it was full of errors. Google did get my gender right but they put me in the wrong age range and a bunch of interests were out of whack. Good thing this was for ads, rather than a heuristic to ban me. Best of the best, top of the class is not infallible. It's good enou…
I have the same experience with ads all the time. Like, I get ads from Google to buy the Pixel XL 2 while I'm browsing the web on the Pixel XL 2 I recently bought from Google on the same account I'm currently signed in to Google with... Or Amazon will give me ads for books and things I recently purchased through Amazon. I think a lot of their abilities are overstated.
It's not Google's fault. It's the people buying the ads who are too lazy or don't know how to do proper targeting.
I've met three people in my life who were employed primarily to place ads on the internet. All three were glorified secretarial drones who fell into the position because nobody else wanted to do it.
Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts
#120Twitter is in a dire situation. As a fun project I wrote a Lua - Torch bot to search for certain tweets and hit like on them based on sentiment analysis. I realized that API query results were mostly news bots, retweet bots, corporate PR bots, social media aggregator platforms like Buffer, and just plain old spam bots. How bad was it? After filtering 1,000 tweets per query, I barely found 10-20 real human users. That…
I've yet to figure out why anyone would consume any kind of content on Twitter. I've used it for a while, and what I got is that it's goos for (and people use it) to spam others about your projects or show off. However, if you try to use it to get news or updates on anything it is the least efficient, most stressful thing I've ever used. I see Twitter as a good tool for outages, natural disasters, and protests. That'…
Twitter is quite excellent for some communities. For Javascript and politics, for example (and also javascript politics), Twitter has become the place where the news actually happens, instead of just being disseminated.