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 engagement that probable spam gets without outright blocking. The latter is operationally preferable since it reduces the cost of false positives and since it makes the iteration loop for the spammers a lot slower.
(But also, I can't remember when I last saw spam in my Twitter feed.)
Crazy how we can have such different experiences. I follow less than 100 accounts and easily 50% of the responses are always spam/scams. It makes Twitter almost unusable for me.
The most ironic part is that Twitter will show the spam/scams, but hide other replies, from real people, that Twitter thinks are mean.
> I follow around 1000. I see almost zero spam. This whole thread is pretty confusing to me.
Same here. I suppose I could go find spam if I start clicking on every Tweet from a high-profile person and scroll to the bottom of the comments, but the spam isn't jumping out at me on a regular basis.
I suspect some people have a very low tolerance for any spam appearing anywhere on a platform, and will get easily triggered whenever it crosses their experience in any way. If you're consuming 100s or 1000s of Tweets and responses in a sitting and scrolling to the bottom of threads, eventually you're going to see something spam-like.
It's not just a few spam like tweets at the bottom of threads though. If you look at tweets by Elon Musk for example there will be loads, as replies at the top of the threads.
Pretty weird how multiple people refuse to believe something can be a problem even though they can't see it.
It depends how twitter is organizing the replies or the device you use. Sometimes twitter arranges comments by newest first but other times it sorts them seemingly randomly. It used to be that verified accounts would always rank high, but then 2019-2020 twitter changed it so that they don't automatically get a ranking boost.
There can be many reason. One of them is that you click on a direct link to a tweet, because the replies will often be on the same screen as the main tweet.
Same. I follow ~700 accounts, and have ~10000 followers, but I get minimal spam. The vast majority of engagements seem genuine.
The last spam I got was where someone tagged me in some bullshit NFT giveaway, where entrants had to tag 5 of their "friends" to qualify. Definitely spam, but at a cursory glance, it was human-generated rather than bot spam.
I get ~one of those NFT spam mentions daily. I don't get why Twitter doesn't outright block accounts that tweet stuff like "giveaway" and "tag.*friends" and are followed by replies that start tagging people, especially people they don't even follow. That's blatant spam.
I don't get much other spam though.
Edit: oh yeah, on a Japanese account I have I get the odd mass DM offering scam sex/easy money/whatever. I've also noticed a trickle of obvious spam account followers there (it's always "girls" with sexy profile pics and a profile blurb that invariably mentions adding her on LINE, and ~zero followers except other bots and just a couple tweets). Spam is very different depending on the market.
Thinking about it now, I do go out of my way to avoid mentioning crypto-adjacent keywords, which helps avoid this type of spam. Perhaps it would be much worse if I didn't.
The keywords seem to trigger scam bots replying to you, but the NFT giveaway stuff just seems to be completely random, based on follow counts, or something like that. It just keeps happening and I've only mentioned NFTs once or twice (to complain about them).
Could it be that you are perhaps unaware of what is a cleverly veiled spam reply or a scam reply? Lots look conversational, even genuine.
You only have to mention NFTs, even in a negative light, and you generally get drive-by likes from verified NFT-related accounts, and if you check their 'Likes', they've liked dozens more tweets since yours. The idea being to draw attention to itself with a certain demographic. Twitter has its own option to report people for this exact behavior.
Likewise, the number of QRTs in replies to things boggles the mind.
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.
Everyone I follow is computer science or software engineering focused though, so maybe Twitter's algorithm can easily recognize my preference and fill my timeline with related tweets.
Maybe someone who follows a more diverse set of interests will get more diverse tweets in their timeline, more likely to include 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.
It is annoying to have to constantly scroll to "show more" replies. Is there a way to get Twitter to show more than just a few at a time? Would be helpful especially because the not-recommended replies are all hidden at the bottom.
What if I want to see what the algorithm is hiding from me? If there are many replies it's time consuming to find out.
Option E: Nobody can even agree on what Twitter spam is.
Is it bots? I follow a few bot accounts and get value out of them. Is it blatantly promotional content? This actually seems to be one of the intended uses of Twitter. Is it low-quality content? I feel like lots of people earnestly tweet out low-quality stuff, and who gets to judge what's low-quality anyway?
To me it’s the fake accounts impersonating a real company with direct links to malicious websites. These responses always get 100s of likes from other bots, and also dozens of replies from other fake bots to make it seem real.
To test this out, just Tweet something like “my Coinbase account isn’t working”
You’ll get dozens of replies from fake Coinbase support scams.
> To test this out, just Tweet something like “my Coinbase account isn’t working”
Maybe this is the difference? Cryptocurrency attracts spammers and scammers at a rate far higher than other conversations.
Now that you mention it, the only time I recall seeing spam lately was when I read the comments on some cryptocurrency Tweets. I usually avoid cryptocurrency discussions on Twitter because the signal to noise ratio on those is so low anyway.
This could be the case, but I suspect if you tweeted “how to reset my chase bank account password” you might get the same level of spam. I don’t think it’s only crypto, just amplified in crypto.
Well, sure. Anything adjacent to the cryptogrift is going to be a cesspool. I very strongly suspect that the very different experiences that people have relate to who they follow and what they post.
> To test this out, just Tweet something like “my Coinbase account isn’t working”
Oh, well there's your problem. Unfortunately the network of people you're following are very close to giant network of scammers that has grown around crypto.
tweet> really hard day today, my great aunt died of covid after a long fight
reply> I know we all probably must have heard about Bitcoin but don't know how it works, I tried it in a week ago and i made a return of $10500 after a week of trading, connect with my trader at @SpamBtcAccount1234
I pulled this reply from the most recent Associated Press tweet. Yeah, I'm sure they've mentioned Bitcoin at some point, but it has nothing to do with my Twitter usage.
I'm curious, what do you expect to find in the replies under massive accounts like Associated Press? I've long since stopped following accounts with more than a couple thousand followers, unless they're super funny or insightful. No raw news. The replies transform from discussions into animated gif spam or actual spam past a certain threshold.
I mean I guess I expect to find replies from humans? I follow AP because getting raw reporting is valuable. I don’t get a lot of value from the comments section, I just used this as an example because I’ve noticed it.
…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 provide reliable ways to disable their unwanted inserts – quickly ignoring any number of 'see less often' choices, and doing things like randomly reverting people from their chosen 'latest' to Twitter's algorithmic 'home' feed.
As fair definitions of 'spam' or even more generally 'harassment' include "continued unwanted interactions against expressed preferences", this means Twitter Inc is the biggest spammer/harasser on its own platform.
Here's one way they do it that isn't documented or widely known: an account can get "searchbanned". While your account is searchbanned, your new tweets can't show up in other people's search results unless they follow you. There is no indication when you've been seachbanned or when the ban is lifted, and no documentation on its existence or how to get un-searchbanned. We know because we gather community input on a specific hashtag, and have gotten complaints that specific people's contributions weren't included, because they didn't show up in the search.
Interestingly, we had one person's account whose search results still showed searchbanned tweets. They would not show for that person if they logged out. We also could not find out why that person's account in particular could see them.
This sounds like a bug we're aware of where an account that goes public -> private we'll reliably purge their tweets from the public index, but if an account goes private -> public sometimes we'll not re-populate the main index correctly.
> we had one person's account whose search results still showed searchbanned tweets
This part doesn't match what I'm describing, but could be explained by the logged in account having access to private tweets in search results that logged out / other accounts do not.
Due to both the second part, and that of the 7 accounts that we know this happened to, they messaged us just hours after tweeting that we weren't picking up their tweets, it doesn't sound like a match. The logged-in account also had no history with the accounts in question; we were actively in a call at the same time trying to figure out why that person could see tweets the others couldn't. I'd be happy to discuss details and specific tweets if you want.
The spam Twitter lets through is ridiculous. Is it hard to catch all offenders? Yes. Is it obvious Twitter is no where close to that? Also yes. We should have higher standards for our social networks.
There does seem to be an incredible amount of low-hanging fruit they just aren’t catching, including a huge amount of tweets that are identical apart from which account they are coming from.
Bot Sentinel [0] can pick these up without any direct access to Twitter’s data, you would think that Twitter would be able to do it with all the extra information they have available to them.
Interestingly the spam is usually under the "possibly offensive replies" fold, so Twitter is detecting that somethings up but falls short of blocking the spam altogether.
"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 from Instagram snapchat facebook i need an artist logo designer
they are probably not making any $ with this or else you would see the same sophistication that goes into this spam as you see with YouTube crypto spam.
Metamask is a crypto wallet manager, and often people mention it in Tweets because they're having some kind of problem using it, so spambots reply with links to fake "Metamask support" pages that helpfully guide you through the process of handing your private keys over to someone who will immediately steal all your bitcoins and monkey JPEGs. That particular type of spam has been around for a while now so people must still be falling for it.
I see lots of spammy content from startup founders, but there is clearly (or maybe bots are better than I think) a human behind it as it appropriately replies to stuff and appropriately piggy backs off trends.
I’ve known a few startups that built their initial user bases utterly deluging Reddit and Twitter in manual spam.
> 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.
That's wrong. Results can be seen even if the process is not transparent. If every bridge the engineer builds collapses, I can judge him without looking into all the drawings. If every business the entrepreneur runs collapses I can make conclusions from that, even without seeing the books. If there's a lot of garbage on Twitter, I can judge it's doing a bad job even if I don't get to see its algorithms.
The experience is based on who you follow. Twitter builds a list of topics based on your activity and it never gets edited, so even if you unfollow someone, that list still influences everything you see.
Algorithm development has been poor and really frustrating to users because if they even come across someone who followed the Kardashians (for example), they literally get spammed with that news for the life of their accounts, and Twitter's "mutewords" functionality has also not worked for many years, I can't tell if that is intentionally so or not.
I think there's a minimum character count for mute to work. My mute list includes "NFT" and "NFTs" and yet plenty of tweets get through. However, other mute words that are longer and not acronyms, will be filtered out as requested.
generally that would indicate that the feature needs an update to address the issue...
But it's rather convenient for the platform to not do that update if it circumvented their profit making interests, and the interests of the other paying entities (like corps and celebrities) that need to promote things that could be otherwise muted for the comfort of their entire user community.
Sure, it's not always a conspiracy theory as someone will likely comment, but in this case, the evidence is clear as daylight.
I get ~2 cryptocurrency spam messages per day. It's not the end of the world, but it's annoying.
Twitter could solve my spam problem tomorrow with a setting that says "don't show any posts with links if they're from accounts none of your friends or friends of friends follow".
That's a bold assumption giving Twitters track record of terribleness. I don't understand what the line of thought here is, anyway - do you want to convince people that see tons of spam on Twitter every day that they are imagining things? It's not real?
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.
Twitter's a company with such a strange relationship with the users of its own site.
I modded /r/Twitter on reddit for a year but burned myself out (I chose to de-moderate FYI) simply because Twitter doesn't care about its community or even recognizing the existence of the community that developed around trying to provide the support the company won't provide on its own. Perhaps my take is cynical, but I really do like the concepts of a social media service like Twitter. The execution of it, however?
Perhaps this is an outsider's perspective but it seems people who work for Twitter would rather pat themselves on the back rather than make improvements.
My complaint of the week - you can't say the words "hacked" and "account" without having scambots asking you to get in touch with "their friend" who will help you restore access to your account. or something. It's just a fucking scam.
Also, just look at threads in reddit flagged with the Bug Report, Complaints, or even Question flair. The users are just bewildered and the experience is 100% user-hostile:
Mastodon's wonderful and Twitter (or anyone, really) should acquihire Eugen Rochko.
If you're going to do the Steve Jobs thing and skate where the puck is going, you should be skating in the direction of ActivityPub. Definitely not in the direction of web3.
ActivityPub is awesome. I hear a lot of criticisms lobbed towards it (some valid, some pointless), but the idea of federation for a feed-based social network just makes so much sense once you start using it. People who like to hide away and form small circles of friends are given the tools they need to do so. Social butterflies who like to follow thousands of people from hundreds of instances can do as they please.
There's also so much room to expand. I'd personally love to see a Disqus implementation that uses ActivityPub identifiers to post comments.
> Twitter doesn't care about its community or even recognizing the existence of the community that developed around trying to provide the support the company won't provide on its own.
It's fascinating that such a community would even need to develop, but maybe it's because of the difference in mediums?
I'm working on an alternative and would love to chat if there's a way to connect!
I'm not sure if any of my insights are to be valued though. I'm just a cynical troll who thinks everything is terrible here. I'd suggest seeking out advice from people who aren't extremely online.
..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 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.
They're keeping their old user base, doing nothing to improve spam for them, while driving new users to a more closed-loop friend system where spam doesn't matter.
> 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…
Weird, my 2014 account doesn't while all my newer ones do. Can't turn it off in newer accounts either (at least not without paying for Twitter Blue?) and definitely never had it on my older account
What I don't understand is that Twitter makes it so difficult for new humans to sign up for an account, how are the robots getting around it?
I wanted to create a second Twitter account, but almost immediately after signing up it was blocked for "suspicious activity". I hadn't even posted yet. The only way to resolve it was to add a phone number to the account, but I only have one and it was already assigned to my first Twitter account.
So I was stuck.
How on earth do the spam robots do it? There are so many.
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.
You can block words, such as NFT or crypto, by going to your user settings. I would recommend everybody to use this feature a lot to avoid stress and content that makes the angry, it’s quite helpful.
I like Twitter blocks! But you can't use a simple keyword block filter to block aggressive spammers who are careful to not use the obvious keywords. Also I'm actively engaged in discussion on Twitter about NFTs and Blockchains, so blocking those keywords does not work for me.
But surely that experience being 20 years ago makes it, at best, academic? Should we act like a 20 year old experience makes someone an expert or just another person with an opinion on the internet?
I cynically wonder how much credibility we give this tweet is due to the author having 1) a huge following and 2) lots and lots of money. And of course 3) it being posted on the forum for the company they founded.
This is a pretty insulting opinion to hold. It's not like the spam messages have gotten infinitely more complex over the last 20 years, or that someone who is a competent programmer just completely forgot everything that they know about a subject.
Also, the spam is so blatant and egregious and repetitive, as pg points out. It doesn't even take an expert to recognize Twitter's doing a strangely awful job at it.
Anytime I see the comments on posts about social media moderation, I laugh my ass off.
People calling it a “hard” problem simply parrot the narrative they see other engineers who have tackled it in leadership positions adopt. The reality is it’s a “Dirty” problem. The equivalent of a sewer cleaner in the old days that is a thankless, low pay, low career prospect, riddled-with-politics , nightmare.
Look up the salary bands for roles in spam fighting. The top 5% probably make bank and even that is not wildly large amounts relative to the valley (~$650k TC which is director level)
The LARGE pools of spending go toward maintaining an army of contractors that get passed down a barrage of things that some teams flag through automation. Same at twitter as it is as Facebook and Google. You need only hit up LinkedIn for the right search keywords to find the contractor hotspots.
The point being, Paul is right. If these platforms wanted to solve the problem, the smartest hires would go there motivated by a culture enabling high impact and good compensation.
The hell hole that is moderation operations would make even those guys with the Six-Sigma-black-belt-world-championship-something ops degrees shed tears for how soul destroying the environment is to work in.
Source: Have friends in these roles. Seen it play out a bit more than a decade at this stage.
What is universally or objectively "offensive"? Is a young attractive woman who is only following me to try to get me to follow her OnlyFans, "offensive"? Is a die-hard materialist atheist, or a strident born-again Christian "protected by the vaccine of God", "offensive"? Is plain nudity "offensive"? Violent photos or movies? Vanilla sex? Hardcore sex? BDSM sex? Bad words? (Bad word filters are easily defeated with creative misspellings or Unicode.)
Is being mean "offensive"? How would you detect that well? The more intelligent the meanness, the harder it would probably be to detect...
Are certain thoughts or concepts offensive? Are they ALWAYS offensive (across both time and location on the Earth), or only for the time being, or only for a place?
Is the word "Jews" offensive? Always, or depending on context or who is saying it?
Is it possible to be satirically offensive in a way that an algorithm would have difficulty detecting? What if I quoted something offensive to argue against it? (I literally got a tempban for this once.)
Perhaps they are "incredibly bad" at it because it is an algorithmically impossible problem that is deeply tied into the subjective sensibilities and tastes of a perceiving consciousness at one point in time (or set of consciousnesses, all of which perhaps only accidentally happen to coincide)
But it could at least be self-consistent. Sometimes identical tweets by different users are given different verdicts. Twitter's offensiveness detection seems about as good as Google's search results.
I've just realised a potential reason for this: we're seeing a spam-detection algorithm several years down the line from when Twitter started. That's several years of cat-and-mouse, where the spammers have access to much higher quality data than Twitter does. If their algorithm was simple, predictable or accurate, the spammers could just work around it. It's plausible that Twitter has run the numbers and determined that this is the best they can do, at the moment.
I've seen non-offensive stuff marked as potentially offensive and assumed it was just that the account makes offensive posts often enough that the default assumption is that the tweets are offensive.
> But it could at least be self-consistent. Sometimes identical tweets by different users are given different verdicts.
Anything deterministic could be defeated in short order. But yeah, I get that criticism.
> Twitter's offensiveness detection seems about as good as Google's search results.
My Google search results are excellent. But I also don't block them anywhere in any capacity; you could possibly argue that Google knows me better than any living person, and I am benefiting from that. lol.
The page I linked shows examples like two tweets from the same author where tweet A says "Thanks" and B says "Thanks, sista" and B is marked offensive while A is not.
You're absolutely right that finding things "offensive" is a complex, ambiguous, and subjective problem. But Twitter isn't even good enough to be failing at that stage. They are basically marking things offensive at random.
It's like - if you said quantum physics was challenging because of all the math, difficulty doing practical experiments, and changing understanding of the universe - all that is probably true. But Twitter is down the hall eating paste, not grappling with those lofty problems.
in the thread, someone links PG's filtering method, which claims 99.5% effectiveness? that would still be getting me 20+ spam emails a day at that rate
further, if you are trying to block, lets say, crypto scams, on a platform which allows strong positive discussion about crypto, which allows people to talk about stuff they are selling for crypto, etc etc etc, you easily start losing points to differentiate
the defender needs to classify every message on the site, in a way that allows detecting spam well after classification, while maintaining over a 99.8% rate these days, while aiming for a 0% false positive rate
the attacker just needs to type random messages at their keyboard and use reused passwords / buy client id/secrets from shitty devs, to get access to verified accounts
When you provide a service to more than a handful of people, there is no winning in any of the decisions you make. There will always be groups of people who will be angry at your actions/inactions.
I've recently seen complaints that gmail has gotten worse at detecting spam, and I've personally seen YouTube's comments are filling with spam. The spammers have probably just gotten better at it.
No tech company needs to care at all about fraud as long as valuations and funding are so closely tied to monthly users, revenue, and other metrics that can be used to launder bad usage as growth.
I've seen some spam on Twitter, but it's is nothing compared to what I see in Instagram comments. Go to any soccer/football post and it is full of bots posing as attractive women.
This is what happens when you outsource moderation to algos and temp workers. Try spamming HN or Reddit with crypto giveaway scams (or any other scam) and see how long you last. (Hint: not long). Algos help , but invariably smart spammers will evade them, hence the needs for humans. Twitter does not lose much business to spam. All they need is to keep most of it under check.
I have a four letter dormant Twitter account.
I get about four mentions/replies per day that link to some nondescript crypto airdrop since several weeks. I manually mark each and every such tweet as spam and block the user, which needs 5 clicks or so. Nothing seems to help.
You know at some point Twitter will just arbitrarily snatch your user name up and assign your account a randomly generated sequence. It's been done before without a given explanation. Just keep that in the back of your mind.
The obvious answer is obvious, but I kinda hope that this would have trained their model a bit. I do get ‚valuable‘ mentions from time to time, so it’s still worth checking.
I followed a lot of academics that turned into spambots around 2020. I'm not sure if they were hacked or just transformed like locust, but they started exclusively spamming covid and anti-trump articles from US media.
Twitter also doesn't care about community and users because all they care about now is year over year profit, which is helped by maintaining the "hopeless poster" situation that exists now. most of the live accounts are probably not logged in, the site is fraught with dead accounts and bots. Trending topics are regularly either bought or spammed to the top.
The real-time news factor of Twitter is delayed and corrupted from all of the bot and misinformation activity that is rampant on the platform, and there's really no organic way left to grow an audience left beyond announcing your twitter handle on TV or bootlegging your way up there.
It's pretty grim. Even many verified accounts, with hundreds of thousands of followers+, are tweeting automated tweets daily to an audience of bot followers because of the dysfunction, and many people like me loathe logging in because the experience is utterly soul destroying. The ball was totally dropped on one of the Internet's greatest tools.
tons of these hacked accounts. They are gusseting thousands of passwords on thousands of accounts and cracking into some of them. So they may harvest 10,000 twitter usernames and then guess the same password on all of them , repeat this for 10,000 most common passwords. Eventually you will get some matches. Rate limiting and other simple measures would fix this.
I mostly treat twitter as a write-only medium: if I want to share something with the world, I might write a tweet about it.
There are a few exceptions - e.g. if there's a specific thing I want to know about, like "is service XYZ experiencing an outage?", I might check twitter. And, sure, if someone sends me DM or a link to a tweet, I'll go read it. But that's about it.
I used to pay closer attention to the notifications, but then they started filling it with random tweets that I don't care about, so now I mostly ignore that too.
If I don't post something. (Or if my company or someone else I know doesn't post something with my handle.) I pretty much get very little in the way of notifications.
Does Wall Street still care about theoretically monetizable metrics like DAU from Twitter? I would think Wall Street is probably expecting real revenue and profit by now.
"Twitter is spending engineering resources on this bs [support for profile photo from NFT] while crypto scammers are throwing a spambot block party in every thread!?"
"Leopards are eating my face!" says Elon, apparently lacking the self-awareness necessary to realize that he's largely responsible for the crypto spammers and NFT craze in the first place.
Yes, it's especially apparent when most of the spam is coming from names that are only a few unicode characters away like El0n Musk. Ridiculous that twitter can't flag that kind of thing.
For a while, Twitter would autoban your account if you changed your display name to "Elon Musk". But apparently either they stopped, or the spammers figured out how to evade the filter.
The best part about this is that the people above telling us they haven't seen spam on Twitter in years just need to click this tweet and scroll a bit.
Anecdote: Troy Polamalu's account (840k followers) has been hacked and scamming people for going on two weeks and his media team can't get Twitter to even respond let alone resolve. :(
They need a feature ASAP where if you ask someone to DM you in a thread it only shows it with a warning that you should make sure this is not a fake lookalike account. Huge and growing problem.
It’s funny, I see that too but they’re never actually the highest ranked comment in the feed order. Rather, they’re always like 40 comments deep in the comment feed surrounded by 1-2 like comments. So IG must strongly suspect they’re spam, but don’t block outright due to the risk of fallout from false positives.
PG is extremely heavy handed with his block button. He is a very delicate little flower. I really don't know what the HN community sees in him. He's not smart or interesting by any stretch of the imagination.
Seeing how HN handles potential spam and spammers, I can see why he would think that Twitter don't care... I think that Twitter just want to give more freedom to their users.
They made a fair point. While it might sound nitpicky to you, they were trying to fine-tune one of the points because getting an accurate summary of the issue is how you start on finding the solution.
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.
>“If you feel the need to complain about <insert product or service here>”
This should never ever translate to “you use it too much”. I mean, speak to the quality of the substance in the argument and not throw out the right to voice an opinion about something that seems broken.
Voicing an opinion about something broken is good but Twitter is clearly a silly social media site. Did he not get the memo? It’s like criticizing Tik Tok for having too much clickbait.
Well, i don't think that's fair. Clickbait isn't against even the terms of service for TikTok and it certainly is not illegal activity.
Scams on the other hand are (at least a big subset), commercial, which cause financial damage and most scams are codified to be illegal actions in law.
What do you think it means? As someone who's worked with people in spam fighting, i'd like to understand a different perspective if you have one.
Low quality clickbait is almost always tied to a commercial end, be it ad click fraud, ad view farming or malware/phishing on the extreme end of the spectrum.
Anything policy violating that's considered "Spam" is likely to be tied to illegal activity 9 times out of 10.
> Low quality clickbait is almost always tied to a commercial end,
Not everything with a commercial end is a scam. I get spam for legitimate products or services all the time. It’s spam because they are abusing a communication channel as an advertising channel, not necessarily because they are trying to scam anyone.
So once again, let’s speak about what the issue is not what it is not.
The argument here isn’t that there are no corner cases where legitimate businesses with 401ks tax returns and all that send you too many communications.
On twitter specifically, low quality clickbait is almost always tied to policy violating , if not illegal activity.
If you can’t even admit that, well, you should really engage in conversation with more good faith or more expertise than you have at present.
> On twitter specifically, low quality clickbait is almost always tied to policy violating , if not illegal activity.
What is your evidence of that?
The OP was about spam not scams. I already identified that you were moving the goalpost or unintentionally projecting a different issue onto this issue.
My point is that spam on Twitter is to be expected. Taking Twitter seriously as a discussion platform is as naive as taking Tik Tok seriously as an video education platform.
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 engagement that probable spam gets without outright blocking. The latter is operationally preferable since it reduces the cost of false positives and since it makes the iteration loop for the spammers a lot slower.
(But also, I can't remember when I last saw spam in my Twitter feed.)