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Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

nytimes.com

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Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#51

Post by hk__2 »

scrollaway wrote: post #21
jacquesm wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter is full of those porn promoting accounts. Typically this is an account with some female name and a profile pic of a person in a state of undress following lots of popular accounts. Twitter doesn't even take them down if you complain about them. Very annoying.

Not just porn. My account with ~150 followers was, out of the blue and within a week, followed by a dozen different "startups". Every single one of them follows tens of thousands of people in the hopes of getting followed back. It's pathetic.

Yeah that’s probably accounts managed by some random shaddy tool that follows tons of people in the hope of getting follow-back then massively unfollow everyone.

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#52

Post by nkkollaw »

ActsJuvenile wrote: post #35

Twitter 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's pretty much it.

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#53

Post by oblio »

We’re probably 10-20 years away from the internet and especially instant messaging becoming a public utility. The product itself is immensely useful but so far hasn’t been monetized except by lock in to a bigger platform or by turning the user into a product.

We’ve had AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo Messenger and many others that can be seen in the list of protocols supported by pidgin.im. Now we have Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, Skype, Hangouts and the thing from Apple.

Or at least there should be a standard everyone that wants to sell to public institutions should follow for instant messaging.

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#54

Post by ImSkeptical »

scrollaway wrote: post #37
freehunter wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean... we are the best of the best of the best, top of the class when it comes to technology and especially creative solutions enabled by technology. We have world-leading machine learning capabilities and hundreds of engineers working around the clock for money that, not that long ago, would have been completely unheard of. We have talent. We have time. We have money. We have passion. We have absolute shitloads o…

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.

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#55

Post by scott_s »

scrollaway wrote: post #31
metalliqaz wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Same applies.

There is no ReactJS company. There is a company behind ReactJS but that's irrelevant since there's also a company behind those millions of fake users. What about my pet open source projects, shall I shut down their account because they don't have a company backing them?

I think you're arguing a point that no one upthread made. The proposal was to make sure that a real person was behind the account, in good faith - not necessarily that person's personal account. So your accounts and the ones you linked to upthread are fine. The "good faith" part means that there can't be a hard-and-fast rule for which Twitter accounts are okay. Human judgement will be required to sort out good-faith users (including brands or open source projects) from bad-faith users (paying people to run accounts that just inflate other accounts' numbers).

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#56

Post by madeofpalk »

ActsJuvenile wrote: post #35

Twitter 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…

> Tumblr today is drowning in porn.

'Drowning' in porn? In the sense that that's a bad thing?

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#57

Post by petercooper »

komali2 wrote: post #41
ActsJuvenile wrote: post #35

Twitter 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…

What's crazy is that bots are not violating Twitter TOS. I reported a bunch of fake accounts I found and was told they aren't breaking any rules, even ones just posting spammy links.

Well, yeah. If they're just tweeting and not @ing at other users, they can't really "spam" anyone since only their followers, who choose to see them, will see those messages.

Twitter does take a pretty dim view of DM and @reply spam though because it is genuinely annoying and not opt-in.

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#58

Post by JoshTriplett »

nkkollaw wrote: post #52
ActsJuvenile wrote: post #35

Twitter 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'…

> 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.

Depends heavily on the set of people you follow. I've found it to be a great source of news, and I typically see news show up there hours to days before I see it show up in places like HN.

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#59

Post by majos »

nkkollaw wrote: post #52
ActsJuvenile wrote: post #35

Twitter 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'…

I use it to follow a relatively small (a few dozen) group of mostly computer scientists with a few cooks/chefs and basketball writers. At this level it takes maybe 1-2 minutes to read an entire day's feed, and I usually end up with a few interesting things to read that I might not have seen otherwise. I have also found it useful at conferences to follow what's happening.

I have no idea how people follow more than say a hundred people profitably.

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