Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#61

Post by chimeracoder » Wed, Jan 31, 2018, 7:08 PM UTC

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…

> BONUS: Guess who else is spamming their post feed: Tumblr. Tumblr didn't allow any adult content or keyword search; since Marissa Mayer took over she seems to have loosened that policy to fluff the numbers. Tumblr today is drowning in porn.

...what?

Tumblr was known for porn long before it sold to Yahoo. If anything, Tumblr started cracking down on blogs with adult content afterwards (for example, requiring users to log in before visiting them). There was a huge backlash from artists and bloggers with non-pornographic gay-themed content, because many of them were caught in the ripple effects from these changes.

I had friends who worked at Tumblr before 2012, and the running joke was that Tumblr was 50% porn and 30% pictures of cats. (Don't take those figures too seriously, but clearly porn was a large part of Tumblr long before the acquisition).

Also, Tumblr definitely did allow adult keywords in searches. I know this because of a rather unfortunate incident at a student hackathon my company sponsored, in which a student thought it would be a "funny" idea to search for a risque phrase when demonstrating his weekend hack (an aggregator of Tumblr posts).

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#62

Post by nkkollaw » Wed, Jan 31, 2018, 7:09 PM UTC

majos wrote: post #59

nkkollaw wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, no idea.

What I find awful is that HN and Reddit save me time by sorting out low-quality content, while on Twitter you're the one that has to work hard to do it (if you can), and Twitter itself just adds more noise in the meantime.

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#63

Post by wpietri » Wed, Jan 31, 2018, 7:11 PM UTC

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…

Or it could be that Twitter cares about fake account impact mainly in terms of user experience. If a fake bot likes a tweet from another fake bot, does any human actually care?

I used to have a much bigger problem on Twitter with fake accounts and bot likes than I did, but despite my decades of willingness to bitch about spam, I have to concede that they've gotten better lately.

There's also a user benefit to letting bots run when they're not hurting anyone: you don't give hints to the spammers on how you're finding and nuking them. Indeed, if you identify them but don't block them, you can get a lot of data on what is spam. For example, on my mail server, I noticed I was getting a lot of dictionary attacks. So I took the hundred most common first names not in use on my domain and fed them all into the spam training system. That means odds are very good that my spam trainer will have seen a piece of spam before they try my actual account.

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#64

Post by 7dare » Wed, Jan 31, 2018, 7:11 PM UTC

JoshTriplett wrote: post #58

nkkollaw wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For instance, if you follow sports, it's an extremely efficient and direct way of keeping up-to-date with teams and players.

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#65

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jan 31, 2018, 7:12 PM UTC

tinbad wrote: post #2

It'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…

[deleted]

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#66

Post by TillE » Wed, Jan 31, 2018, 7:14 PM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #63

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…

Or it could be that Twitter cares about fake account impact mainly in terms of user experience. If a fake bot likes a tweet from another fake bot, does any human actually care? I used to have a much bigger problem on Twitter with fake accounts and bot likes than I did, but despite my decades of willingness to bitch about spam, I have to concede that they've gotten better lately. There's also a user benefit to letting…

You get to see a flood of spambots if you make the mistake of clicking any of the trending hashtags, but otherwise yeah it's a non-issue for the vast majority of Twitter usage.

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#67

Post by linkmotif » Wed, Jan 31, 2018, 7:15 PM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #63

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…

Or it could be that Twitter cares about fake account impact mainly in terms of user experience. If a fake bot likes a tweet from another fake bot, does any human actually care? I used to have a much bigger problem on Twitter with fake accounts and bot likes than I did, but despite my decades of willingness to bitch about spam, I have to concede that they've gotten better lately. There's also a user benefit to letting…

> If a fake bot likes a tweet from another fake bot, does any human actually care?

Very nice!

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#68

Post by 7dare » Wed, Jan 31, 2018, 7:15 PM UTC

patorjk wrote: post #36

I'm having trouble understanding the follower visualizations. Does the X axis represent her followers in the order they started following her and the Y axis is the date they (the follower) joined Twitter?

The original article suffered from the same flaw, and they never really explained it.

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#69

Post by icognito293765 » Wed, Jan 31, 2018, 7:18 PM UTC

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 occasionally fetch some works from japanese artists (SFW and not) from twitter since not all of them use pixiv and as far as my browsing experience goes their retweets, conversations, mentions and so on all seem to point to other humans.

Likes, Followers and accounts yelling into some hashtags can be dominated bots. But if you look at the feeds of individual people and those that they talk with that's a totally different experience.

> Tumblr today is drowning in porn.

Tumblr has had NSFW for a long time now. If anything some of it may have migrated to patreon now that it is easier to monetize.

Re: Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries into Fake Accounts

#70

Post by ionforce » Wed, Jan 31, 2018, 7:18 PM UTC

ForrestN wrote: post #46

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…

A lot of Tumblr porn is actually very specifically (and astutely) curated. The few times I've visited, it's actually a much nicer experience than porn websites. If anything, I think Tumblr would be wise to lean into being, among other things, a space for the sharing of erotic content. Maybe there's some spam but it's pretty easy to find your way into non-spam on Tumblr in my experience.

Isn't that a bit thorny since most of the content is copyrighted...