[HN Gopher] Twitter doesn't care about spam? ___________________________________________________________________ Twitter doesn't care about spam? Author : caaqil Score : 114 points Date : 2022-01-28 18:49 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (twitter.com) (TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com) | iqanq wrote: | >Philosophically might be isomorphic to c), but I would probably | diagnose extreme and pervasive mismanagement resulting in it | being incentive-incompatible for any individual at Twitter to | spend 2022 fixing the spam problem. | https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1487023647294296064 | | "Acshually," | tomcatfish wrote: | 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. | [deleted] | whit537 wrote: | 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. :( | | https://www.reddit.com/r/steelers/comments/s6zx3c/polamalus_... | https://www.reddit.com/r/steelers/comments/s67xoi/troy_polam... | https://twitter.com/tpolamalu (scammer took it private) | loceng wrote: | Relevant tweet from Elon Musk yesterday: | | "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!?" | | - https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1484456594775678976?cxt=... | deckard1 wrote: | "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. | | https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1371549960030842893 | | He seems to not realize the impact of having 70M followers. | It's not a WhatsApp group chat, Elon. | loceng wrote: | Your tweet reference was him trolling. And he obviously does | understand his reach, you saying that isn't a proof point. | stefan_ wrote: | 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. | lkbm wrote: | I did, saw no spam. Clicked "More Replies" three or four | times. Still none unless you count | https://twitter.com/saylor/status/1484546928704696321 | | Can you link a few? Maybe we have algorithm sort set | differently? Are you showing "Newest First" or whatever it's | called? | aeternum wrote: | 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. | duskwuff wrote: | 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. | loceng wrote: | Makes me wonder how the leadership is financially aligned | with allowing it. | DisjointedHunt wrote: | 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. | riffic wrote: | Masnick's Impossibility Theorem is a fun one to quote in these | types of threads. | | Content moderation at scale is impossible to do well. There's | never going to be perfection here. It's over. | | Your points are also 100% valid and on-the-nose. | | https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191111/23032743367/masni... | babyshake wrote: | 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. | coolso wrote: | We know, otherwise about 3/4 of all tweets ever made on the | platform wouldn't exist. | LeoPanthera wrote: | 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. | president wrote: | Where there is money to be made, there is always a way | NelsonMinar wrote: | The new flood of cryptocurrency and NFT scams has really made my | Twitter spam problem worse. Meanwhile Twitter is endorsing NFTs | with UI features. | [deleted] | dgellow wrote: | 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. | MarkMc wrote: | I'm currently on holiday in Thailand and Twitter has decided to | show me ads in Thai (a language I don't speak). | | I think it's just more exciting for people at Twitter to work on | NFTs than to do boring work like spam control or filtering ads by | user language. | nostromo wrote: | PG has experience in this space, remember. He played a role in | helping detect and prevent spam back in the day. | | https://www.infoworld.com/article/2674702/techology-business... | CyberRabbi wrote: | If you feel the need to complain about the quality of Twitter | posts you use Twitter too much. Get a more interesting hobby for | your own sake | DisjointedHunt wrote: | >"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. | CyberRabbi wrote: | 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. | RichardHeart wrote: | I spend a very large amount of my day manually deleting spam. It | makes me sad. | ceedan wrote: | Instagram is also terrible with spam. I often see spam comments | that are voted up by dozens/hundreds of spam accounts. | kevinventullo wrote: | 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. | winternett wrote: | 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. | fleddr wrote: | 100% agree. Twitter seems to have an outsized cultural | influence but is dead or dysfunctional in so many ways. | chrischattin wrote: | Of course they don't care about spam. It pumps their engagement | numbers up. They have a direct financial incentive to let it | continue. | slimsag wrote: | ..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. | | [0] | https://twitter.com/mattthr/status/1009095580109426688?lang=... | tekacs wrote: | > 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... | BLanen wrote: | Jack Dorsey is a cypherpunk libertarian, of course Twitter | doesn't care. | jsnell wrote: | 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.) | [deleted] | fleddr wrote: | We can judge it just fine as it's plain to see. | | Take an account that attracts bots, Elon Musk is one of many | examples. What do we see... | | a) Hundreds of replies in the very first few seconds. It's | humanly impossible to post this fast. | | b) Replies share the exact same profile photo, typically of a | well known original account. | | c) User names are all a slight misspelling of a well known | original account. | | d) What they post is repetitive, same spam links and texts. | | Every single pattern above, as well as combinations of them, | are absolutely trivial to detect. But absolutely nothing is | done about it. | ryanSrich wrote: | 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. | riffic wrote: | shadowbanning. Twitter says they don't shadowban[0] but they | absolutely do if you tweet things that trigger their | sentiment analysis algorithms: | | [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitter/comments/p1ggm4/rtwitter | _at... | jbkiv wrote: | Same here. Unbearable. Stupid suggestions. It has become | close to worse than my old yahoo.com email address that I | used for junk requests. | SkyMarshal wrote: | I follow around 5000, zero spam. | | 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. | | Just a guess, dunno for sure. | stevage wrote: | I follow around 1000. I see almost zero spam. This whole | thread is pretty confusing to me. | lkbm wrote: | Every Elon Musk tweet is (or was a while back) filled with | spam replies, but I don't recall seeing much outside of | that. | paulpauper wrote: | a few people hit elon twitter hard with spam, made | craploads of $ from it | PragmaticPulp wrote: | > 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. | wartijn_ wrote: | 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. | paulpauper wrote: | if depends who and what you follow. crypto always has tons | of spam | hammyhavoc wrote: | 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. | scantron4 wrote: | >You only have to mention NFTs, even in a negative light, | | Play stupid games win stupid prizes? | hammyhavoc wrote: | 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. | riffic wrote: | Hello dear, I recommend you to message my friend on | lnstagram I just recovered my account that was hacked | with his help! /s | hammyhavoc wrote: | Shoot me! | riffic wrote: | you've been permanently suspended by Twitter for | promoting self-harm and glorifying violence. | fossuser wrote: | Just tweet the word "metamask" in any context and instantly | get three replies from bots trying to scam you. | | There's a ton of stuff like this. | Cederfjard wrote: | I'm curious what kind of accounts you follow? I follow mostly | American political pundits, journalists and lawyers, and I | very rarely see spam. | rchaud wrote: | 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. | imgabe wrote: | Yep, I made a joke about buying the dip and pretty much | immediately got a spam reply from some account shilling a | crypto newsletter or something. | crackercrews wrote: | 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. | gojomo wrote: | Twitter's biggest external spam problems are: | | * abuse of @-replies | | * unsolicitied DMs | | ...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. | bhauer wrote: | > _Twitter does not provide reliable ways to disable their | unwanted inserts_ | | Indeed. I'd argue that the "Who to Follow" insert is worse | than any spam I have seen or deal with. | imgabe wrote: | 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. | winternett wrote: | 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. | stevage wrote: | Eh? Muting words works just fine ? | winternett wrote: | On your account perhaps, because you don't follow the same | people I do... Not on my 2, and for many friends I know. | | Try muting "BTS" The (K-Pop group) as an example. | rchaud wrote: | 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. | winternett wrote: | 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. | jonathan-adly wrote: | Just tweet metamask lol - its the magic word. | | Edit: _WARNING_ this will immediately fill your feed with spam. | Don 't click anything that you get. | nickstinemates wrote: | Hilarious. This is actually true. | | https://twitter.com/nickstinemates/status/148716175094431334. | .. | jsheard wrote: | 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. | duskwuff wrote: | "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 | paulpauper wrote: | it can help your tweet rank higher | paulpauper wrote: | 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. | | These guys are not on their A game here. | metadat wrote: | Huh? Can you explain this one, please? | [deleted] | bastawhiz wrote: | You'll immediately get replies from spam bots | jsheard wrote: | 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. | userbinator wrote: | Thanks for the explanation. As I've stayed far away from | cryptocurrencies, I thought it was Covid related at | first. | cmckn wrote: | metamask is a crypto thing, huge amounts of twitter spam | are related to crypto nonsense. | [deleted] | pmarreck wrote: | Seems like a perfect honeypot candidate | stochaztic wrote: | 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. | robinson-wall wrote: | Hey, I work on Twitter's search team. | | 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. | stochaztic wrote: | 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. | robinson-wall wrote: | Happy to take a look (next week, realistically, as I'm UK | based) - you can dm me twitter.com/nickrw | jonas21 wrote: | 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? | ryanSrich wrote: | 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. | [deleted] | PragmaticPulp wrote: | > 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. | ryanSrich wrote: | 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. | lupire wrote: | it's a lot easier to rob a confused cryptocurrency holder | than a confused bank account holder. | ghaff wrote: | 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. | cmckn wrote: | 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 | xapata wrote: | Sounds like the variable is whether one engages with | Bitcoin discussion. I don't, and have observed no spam. | MattGaiser wrote: | 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. | pmarreck wrote: | > First, we don't see the spam that was outright blocked, so we | have no idea of what the false negative rate is | | Yep. Perfect example of the Survivorship Fallacy/Bias | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias | stefan_ wrote: | 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? | | Like, no, I see it every day. Lots of it. | 3pt14159 wrote: | (Like always, speaking just for myself here) | | 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. | nathias wrote: | 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. | paulpauper wrote: | 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. | hamiltonians wrote: | It is even worse on youtube | | Crypto giveaway livestream scammers stand to make from $300 | million to -$1 billion/year | | https://scaminvestigations.substack.com/p/youtube-crypto-giv... | | https://twitter.com/saylor/status/1487141374386450440 | | The spam and scams are so persistent because they make so much | money, the scammers invest considerable time evading the algos, | staying one step ahead. | nfriedly wrote: | 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. | ghaff wrote: | 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. | 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: | Every time Twitter makes a move people either cry censorship or | they cry that deleting the spam helps "one side". | ziml77 wrote: | 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. | kdiwoqlgkf wrote: | tough wrote: | Since I added my .eth domain to my name 1 week ago, I've got 3 | identical looking spam DM's about NFT's or the next Shitcoin... | just saying | nitwit005 wrote: | 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. | hamiltonians wrote: | all over the place on twitter | | https://twitter.com/EGYPTAIR/status/1487141414442053633 | | 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. | bigjimmyjohnson wrote: | I'm pretty sure the main point of Twitter is spam. | marban wrote: | What if Twitter actually does care about spam and what we see is | just the tip of the iceberg that makes it through the filters or | is just semi-spam? | beebmam wrote: | 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 | draugadrotten wrote: | 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. | partiallypro wrote: | 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. | jppope wrote: | They definitely have a spam problem, but cleaning it up would | create a business problem... so they leave the cesspool. | wnevets wrote: | > You're unable to view this Tweet because this account owner | limits who can view their Tweets | | I must've sent spam... | temp8964 wrote: | A demonstration of fake accounts on twitter: | https://twitter.com/search?q=coinbase%20support&src=typed_qu... | jzwinck wrote: | 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. | | More accounts means more money. Follow the money. | asojfdowgh wrote: | 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 | pchristensen wrote: | This is a good place to start - http://paulgraham.com/spam.html | [deleted] | ALittleLight wrote: | Twitter is also incredibly bad at identifying offensive Tweets - | https://inteoryx.com/htmls/TwitterOffensive.html | pmarreck wrote: | 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) | ALittleLight wrote: | 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. | wizzwizz4 wrote: | 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. | ziml77 wrote: | 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. | pmarreck wrote: | > 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. | steelstraw wrote: | Would Twitter be better if they charged a small fee per tweet? | riffic wrote: | 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: | | https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitter/search?q=flair%3ABug%2BRepo... | | https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitter/search?q=flair%3ACOMPLAINTS... | | https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitter/search?q=flair%3AQuestion&r... | holler wrote: | > 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! | riffic wrote: | > a way to connect | | same username on Twitter, Reddit, and @gmail | | 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_. | wizzwizz4 wrote: | > _Perhaps my take is cynical, but I really do like the | concepts of a social media service like Twitter. The execution | of it, however?_ | | Have you heard of Mastodon? https://joinmastodon.org. If so, | how do you think it compares? | riffic wrote: | 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. | smoldesu wrote: | 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. | jonathan-adly wrote: | I wonder if spam bots count in their monetizable daily active | users count that Wall street looks for every quarter. Would sure | explain a lot. | leereeves wrote: | 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. | smoldesu wrote: | Yeah, I'd imagine the only real thing they care about is | clickthrough rate at this point. Betting on DAU/MAU is a | suckers game. | jonathan-adly wrote: | You would be surprised. I get all kind of "sophisticated" | reddit IPO advice, where they are using Twitter DAU as a | comparison. | saagarjha wrote: | Twitter tracks "monetizable Daily Active Users", which are | those that they can show ads (or subscribe to Twitter Blue). | habi wrote: | 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. | riffic wrote: | > four letter dormant Twitter account | | 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. | habi wrote: | How? I'm still 'using' the account for likes and reading | stuff from friends, just don't post anything myself. | riffic wrote: | They'll still take the username out from underneath of you | if they so choose. It's been done before. | | one example: https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitter/comments/lbv0 | eo/twitter_use... ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-01-28 23:01 UTC)