[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...
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