[HN Gopher] The spam on Twitter
___________________________________________________________________
The spam on Twitter
Author : powera
Score : 201 points
Date : 2022-09-14 17:05 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| duxup wrote:
| A twitter account I signed up for a while back was immediately
| followed by someone who claimed to live in the city my zip code
| falls in and described themself as "a former libtard who saw the
| light". Followed by the exact posts you would expect, including
| odd local location name dropping.
|
| It was not a great start.
| tenpies wrote:
| It has gotten so much worst to the point that I wonder if Twitter
| employees are trying to execute some sort of poison pill so that
| Musk does not purchase the company, and they can continue to
| amplify their agendas and squelch opposition.
| aaronrobinson wrote:
| The other way around. He's cited fake account levels and trying
| to get out of the deal.
| shabbatt wrote:
| Unfortunately crypto has fueled this. I regularly see coinbase or
| binance profiles in the reply section of highly visible tweets.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Not being a big Twitter user, I didn't understand the whole "blue
| checkmark verified" scam, which works like this:
|
| 1. There are a host of requirements needed to get the blue check:
| https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/about-twit...
|
| 2. However, once an account gets the blue check, _the owner is
| free to change the profile pic and display name_ , and the blue
| check doesn't go away.
|
| 3. So the scam is that some bad guy buys a previously verified
| account, changes the profile pic and display name to someone
| _else_ famous, then uses it to phish.
|
| #2 is colossally stupid, and is trivial to prevent (lots of
| dating sites require profile changes and pic changes to be
| reviewed before going live). Apparently this has been going on a
| long time so is baffling to me.
| omgomgomgomg wrote:
| Wow, this is incredible, this would be as if in fintech you let
| customers change their data of the onboaring information
| without checking again.
| summerlight wrote:
| https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/about-twit...
|
| > If changes to your account are misleading or substantially
| alter the persona present on your account
|
| You will lose the badge if you try to do the 2nd. But currently
| it doesn't proactively apply preventative measures, which is
| definitely a problem. Twitter obviously doesn't have bandwidth
| to proactively prevent all those scams, but at least last
| reviewed profiles should be visible to users for verification.
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| Before I got off of Twitter years ago, friends of mine would
| make a background image with a blue checkmark and then add it
| to their profile so it looked like you were verified.
|
| Easier than going through all the channels. Not sure if this
| still works, but a clever hack to get around (at the time) a
| very long process to get your identity verified.
| waylandsmithers wrote:
| I'm an uncool dad but thought the check mark was like, this
| account really is the famous person the account claims to be,
| like Brad Pitt or Oprah. Now it's always someone I've never
| heard of.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Famous to who though and how famous? I recently clicked
| through to a profile of someone I had never heard of and they
| had 5m+ followers. This isn't a "look how out of touch I am
| with pop culture" humblebrag they were just from a different
| part of the world, famous in a language I don't speak.
|
| And maybe not too similar but the mayor of my city only has a
| couple tens of thousands of followers but is definitely known
| by everyone who lives in it and yes has a blue check.
|
| How famous is famous enough isn't a question with an obvious,
| or single answer.
| godelski wrote:
| About once a week I get a mass message from a random twitter
| account with extremely clear spam (they even leave the group
| message after they send it!). They are often centered around
| crypto. I don't know how they are this bad because a Naive
| Bayesian Classifier could block this stuff.
| loeg wrote:
| Step 2.5 is probably the bad guy hacks some existing blue-
| checkmark account, but yeah.
| landr0id wrote:
| >2. However, once an account gets the blue check, the owner is
| free to change the profile pic and display name, and the blue
| check doesn't go away.
|
| afaik twitter will remove your verification status if you do
| this maliciously. Like trying to impersonate a famous person
| and make it look like they're saying something stupid.
| datagram wrote:
| Yeah but as the OP shows, this probably happens much too late
| to stop harm if it happens at all.
|
| Just checked, and the account from the screenshot is still
| around and still verified.
| bombcar wrote:
| Twitter users love changing their profile picture/name to
| support the current cause of the moment so much that it's
| become a meme. Changing that would piss off their active
| posters.
| ben_w wrote:
| Annoying such people is probably a price worth paying:
| https://news.sky.com/story/tories-criticised-for-
| misleading-...
| pleas4nt0ne wrote:
| pawelduda wrote:
| Pretty simple to solve - change your profile pic/name, lose
| blue checkmark until you get verified again.
| badwolf wrote:
| This is kind of how Scruff (gay dating app) works. Change
| your profile pic? Lose your verified status and have to go
| thru verification again.
| KeepFlying wrote:
| That would kill a lot of Twitter culture though (for better
| or worse). Changing a name for "spooky season", updating a
| profile pic to promote a new event, etc. It also would make
| it risky for a large company to change their logo (if Volvo
| loses verification for a few days it opens them up to a ton
| of scams).
| KerrAvon wrote:
| No problem: add a second line with the verified name, or put
| the verified name in hover text if it differs from the
| display name. The verified name could still be a pseudonym,
| but it couldn't change without going through the verification
| process again.
|
| Also, anyone willing to go through the verification process
| should get a blue check. Right now it's dependent on some
| Twitter insider liking the account holder (the insanely
| bullshit "Notable" requirement).
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| This is already the case, the verified name is the account
| name, which is always displayed just below the nickname.
| What's your plan? Add a 3rd name?
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| Remove nicknames.
| JieJie wrote:
| "There are 44,935 people named John Smith in the United
| States."
|
| https://alexaanswers.amazon.com/question/24Ryred578w14fHw
| RNC...
| KeepFlying wrote:
| You'd still have edge cases where a change in verified name
| is needed (marriages, avoiding deadnaming, etc). A solution
| like this might narrow the problem space, but it doesn't
| solve the issues.
| fknorangesite wrote:
| > the current cause of the moment
|
| Doesn't even need to be a cause - it's almost October, which
| means it's "change it to a spooky pun of your regular name"
| season.
| cmelbye wrote:
| Could they simply disable the ability to change display names
| for verified users? It must match the government-issued ID /
| business documents / etc. that were used to verify in the first
| place. If you want to change it, send updated verification
| documents.
|
| This takes away an avenue for self-expression (people will
| often change their display names based on trends, etc.) and
| might have edge cases (like transgender people whose preferred
| names may not match government ID cards) but it seems like it
| would be a step in the right direction...
| tablespoon wrote:
| > It must match the government-issued ID / business documents
| / etc. that were used to verify in the first place. If you
| want to change it, send updated verification documents.
|
| That seems like a bad requirement, because I'd imagine a lot
| of these legitimately-verified accounts go by professional
| names (e.g. actors, authors with a pen name, etc.) not legal
| names.
| michaelt wrote:
| You can be flexible in the initial validation - it's
| reasonable to allow William Jefferson Clinton to go by Bill
| Clinton if he wants to.
|
| And it's reasonable to allow name changes - it's not
| unusual for people to get married, or for companies to
| rebrand.
|
| But why let people change names without repeating the
| validation process? It's not like people are getting
| married several times a year or anything like that.
| zerocrates wrote:
| A sane policy would be that there's a process for verified
| accounts to change their name, and that process is that
| some human at Twitter sees the account's current name and
| new name and rejects changes that aren't obviously still
| "the same person." A policy like this could prevent these
| kind of "pretend to be Vitalik or Elon or whoever" schemes
| without actually having to review the verification itself.
|
| So you can still allow hashtags and emoji and so on being
| stuck onto names, still allow "spooky" Halloween names, but
| preserve some kind of value from the verified checkmark.
|
| I don't know how many verified users there are but this
| doesn't seem like it would necessarily be onerous. Of
| course, it's still more onerous than just doing nothing
| about it is.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| would that be useful if you don't require at least monthly
| proof?
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Could they simply disable the ability to change display
| names for verified users?
|
| I don't know if I agree with this solution, but it is bizarre
| that there are plenty of blue checks where neither their
| twitter @id nor their display name have anything to do with
| their actual name. _Who is the blue check verifying that they
| are?_
|
| I propose showing the verified identity (whether that's a
| stage name or whatever) on mouseover on the blue check icon.
| I'll take my consulting fee through paypal.
| _jal wrote:
| > Who is the blue check verifying that they are
|
| This is exactly my issue with the whole phenomena. They're
| utterly useless as anything but a weird form of status
| symbol.
|
| Hell, Twitter may as well sell them, might help with the
| revenue issue.
| asddubs wrote:
| Well, it kind of makes sense if you have e.g. a big youtube
| channel under and alias and people would know who you are
| based on that (e.g. Veritasium) but less people would know
| what your actual name is. However I don't use twitter so I
| have no idea how liberally this sort of thing is applied
| Tenoke wrote:
| Sometimes people are famous under a username or pseudonym.
| Also Twitter generally verifies people at risk of being
| impersonated. It doesn't matter if you know who say CZ is
| but if thousands of people would pretend to be him and
| others will fall for it it helps to verify who the real one
| is.
|
| Though clearly they should disable name changing post
| verification or something so the checkmark itself doesn't
| help to impersonate others.
| _dain_ wrote:
| >This takes away an avenue for self-expression (people will
| often change their display names based on trends, etc.) and
| might have edge cases (like transgender people whose
| preferred names may not match government ID cards) but it
| seems like it would be a step in the right direction...
|
| or you know, women changing their surnames after getting
| married ...
| miki123211 wrote:
| People get verified because they're pretty well known, and
| people are rarely known by their legal names.
|
| Celebrities are the obvious example, you probably know who
| Eminem or Lady Gaga are, but very few people know who
| Marshall Bruce Mathers III or Stefani Joanne Angelina
| Germanotta are. Others might also want to have their title in
| there names, for example presidents, professors, kings etc.
| toss1 wrote:
| True, and there should be a way for people to get verified
| and use their professional / public persona names as
| Verified Identities.
|
| They just don't get to change the name or image on the
| account without going through a manually verified update
| process. Pretty trivial, a singer goes on a new tour and
| wants to use a new headshot, checks out faster than reading
| this paragraph. A cracker hijacks the account and wants to
| change it to Vitalik Buterin, also pretty obvious to deny,
| as this is clearly a different identity inconsistent with
| the previous one.
| KeepFlying wrote:
| That isn't always easy to verify though if you aren't
| familiar with the person, their public image, and their
| current events.
|
| For example if Ed Sheeran changes their profile picture
| to an X, how do you know he means his Multiply album and
| not some terrible Lil Nas X impersonation. What about if
| a performer changes their stage name? Can we reliably
| expect Twitter research this change and know that its the
| same person?
| ryan29 wrote:
| It's not a very good system either because it's called
| verification, but it's actually indicating popularity or
| notoriety. People hear "verified" and correlate that with
| trustworthiness when all that check mark is really indicating
| is "this person _appears to be_ famous. "
| Jerrrry wrote:
| 4. Repeat steps 1-3 for non-verified users
|
| 5. Report targeted user for mimicry/impersonation.
|
| 6. Targeted user gets insta-banned.
| jeffbee wrote:
| This guy has personally contributed to building the Hell he now
| inhabits. He yammered about crypto - an outright scam - for years
| and now he's sad that his feed is full of crypto scammers.
| There's a meme template for this!
| paxys wrote:
| I'd prefer outright crypto scams over all the "There are many
| ways to improve your life. Here are 30 best ones" threads that
| have taken over my feed over the last few months. PLEASE give me
| a way to turn that off.
| Finnucane wrote:
| There is a way. It's pretty obvious if you think about it.
| AYBABTME wrote:
| [conspiracy theory hat on] what if Elon is pushing a spam
| campaign to support his argument in court? [/conspiracy theory
| hat on]
| samatman wrote:
| I think this is almost exactly backward: the flagrant, constant
| spammers using his name and picture, which is absolutely
| trivial for Twitter to prevent, have been dogging his mentions
| in great numbers for years.
|
| It eventually pissed him off enough that he figured that buying
| the company was the only way to solve the problem.
|
| He might be right about that.
| DominoTree wrote:
| This has been going on far longer than any of his financial
| entanglement with Twitter, unfortunately.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| The level of reply spam on Twitter is irrelevant to the legal
| status of the merger agreement.
| bogwog wrote:
| Relevant: https://www.techdirt.com/2022/07/25/if-someone-is-
| prattling-...
| LightG wrote:
| But the prominence of the issue is. Wheel out a "whistle-
| blower" or two and Bob's your Uncle.
|
| Forgive me, there are enough cultish Elon worshippers around
| that I can easily give credence to this theory. In fact, on
| the balance of probability (given the fanatics and Musks
| powers), I would say it is actually the most reasonable
| explanation.
| SrslyJosh wrote:
| He waived due diligence, so too bad for him.
| bambax wrote:
| It's unlikely that PG suddenly discovered Twitter spam problem.
| Sounds like he's cultivating Musk, or at the very least, trying
| to signal that he supports him.
|
| A couple of weeks ago, Matt Levine predicted that would happen:
|
| > _If you have something to do with Twitter, or you know
| something about Twitter, or you are in the business of counting
| Twitter bots, then you should take a few minutes and ask
| yourself: Well, do I know anything about Twitter doing any
| massive frauds? If you do... look, I don't know exactly what you
| can do with that. (...) Still. I just have a vague general sense
| that saving the richest person in the world $44 billion is a good
| career move._
|
| > _So you should expect that,_ over the next month or two, _as
| Musk's trial date with Twitter approaches,_ people will be
| popping up _to say "oh sure Twitter is a fraud, massive fraud,
| totally, I have proof, Elon, call me."_
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-08-23/amc-go...
| barnbuilder wrote:
| Yes he probably knew about Twitter's pervasive spam problem
| before but today has been a particularly bad day, as spammers
| are deploying a large number of hijacked verified accounts to
| impersonate the Ethereum founder coinciding with a major
| network change happening today.
|
| While all spam is bad, scams posted from a fake "verified"
| account are particularly odious.
| SrslyJosh wrote:
| > Sounds like he's cultivating Musk, or at the very least,
| trying to signal that he supports him.
|
| Well, Musk waived due diligence, so... -\\_(tsu)_/-
| MattGaiser wrote:
| I'm surprised you can change a verified account name and retain
| the verification. That seems like the biggest flaw.
| meowface wrote:
| Naturally, the top reply under that is the exact same scam-spam
| in the screenshot.
| lifefeed wrote:
| If you mute "NFT" and various crypto keywords you won't see 99%
| of the spam. It's a not a scalable solution, but it works well
| for me.
| awinter-py wrote:
| Patti harrison gives an interview about getting kicked off of
| twitter for using the blue check system to play a prank on nilla
| wafers.
|
| Tbh I think it's cool that twitter has a validation system and is
| still kind of a dark forest. (As long as users understand that's
| what they're there for).
|
| 'There's such a thing as too little fraud' is a take I saw
| somewhere recently.
|
| Ben Franklin + Alexander Pope both used almanacs, a social media
| analog from their era, to fake the deaths of opponents (in
| Franklin's case it was an opposing almanac publisher whose death
| he predicted in his first issue).
| 101008 wrote:
| How did they get the blue checkmark on Twitter? It is really hard
| to get one honestly (I applied a few times showing that my
| "brand" was quoted/linked on Wikipedia and several large media
| outlets) - unless they are paying several thousands (which I
| don't think this is the case)
| djbusby wrote:
| Yeah, my old account, for a business, valid trademark, etc -
| check box rejected :(
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| It's a hacked account that got rebranded.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| I am surprised you can rebrand without redoing verification.
| sc00ty wrote:
| I believe you can change your display name but if you
| change your @username you have to go through some re-
| verification process.
| MallocVoidstar wrote:
| A lot of big name people will add small notes about
| important announcements to their display names (new book
| out, stuff like that) so preventing name changes entirely
| would be very unpopular.
| bee_rider wrote:
| This seems like it ought to be easy to work around. Like,
| verify a base name, and then give them a little space
| afterwards where they can add something. The displayed
| name is the combination of the two. They can even make it
| a different color to emphasize the announced thing.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Changing the visible display name frequently is a
| significant part of Twitter culture. In a few weeks, tons
| of people will change their name to a "spooky" version
| for Halloween, for example. It's not a feature Twitter
| will kill just because of a few scammers.
| bombcar wrote:
| Great we made usernames into tweets. Tweetception.
| Jasper_ wrote:
| Brands like to promote products or events in their Twitter
| bios/titles/avatars, and adding a forced reverify step
| would add enough friction for them to use Twitter less.
| itslennysfault wrote:
| You can just buy one. You're allowed to change your name,
| profile, picture without losing the blue check. So if you buy
| (or steal) an existing account you can just update it to
| whatever you want and keep the check.
| acomjean wrote:
| There was a post on HN in the past month about people using
| music and self publishing to get that blue check.
|
| See:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32662123
|
| (edit: that was instagram, but its probably the same idea..)
| arcticbull wrote:
| There's a whole crypto scam industry where hackers/scammers
| will sell accounts they've taken over to folks who immediately
| start shilling NFTs and pump/dump coins.
|
| The economics of it are interesting, the accounts can be
| expensive. But it must work out otherwise nobody would do it.
| michaelwww wrote:
| I find the lack of spam filtering tools Twitter provides us to be
| appalling. "vitalik.eth 50,000 Ethereum give away" is a well
| known example that keeps appearing from new accounts. I should be
| able to set filter. Right now I can only hide all content from
| the account, which keeps changing.
| seizethecheese wrote:
| You can definitely mute keywords
| mh- wrote:
| FYI, they have to be exact phrase matches though. So you'll
| have to add permutations like "Ethereum giveaway" "Ethereum!
| give away".
| nevereveragain wrote:
| You can add keyword blocks instead of blocking the entire
| account. Isn't obvious, but it's there.
| michaelwww wrote:
| Hey, learn something new every day
|
| How to use advanced muting options
|
| https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/advanced-
| twitter-m...
| Aaronstotle wrote:
| Twitter and Instagram seem to be overloaded with bots. In my
| Twitter DMs I get 5-10 messages per day from clear crypto-scams,
| and under posts from high profile people there are loads of bots.
|
| Instagram is no better, bots comment some obvious scam statement
| "Who wants to see me naked" with 140 likes on a post that was
| just created. Instagram doesn't want to address the problem
| because it gives them fake "user" numbers.
| leobg wrote:
| Dude, it's 5 percent.
|
| ;)
| LightG wrote:
| I would wager it's much less.
|
| This is only a problem for certain blue checks.
|
| The problem is thus amplified because these big dawgs are
| moaning about it.
|
| Forgive me for not caring.
|
| This is like King Charles the 3rd complaining about his
| dripping pen (true current news story). I'm sure it
| incredibly annoying to him but to the rest of people it's
| laughable.
|
| I'll accept that it's a problem for followers of these big
| dawgs.
|
| But maybe there's a lesson in there somewhere.......
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| >"This is like King Charles the 3rd complaining about his
| dripping pen (true current news story). I'm sure it
| incredibly annoying to him but to the rest of people it's
| laughable."
|
| Given the enormous amount of stress and pressure he is
| currently under, not just as the new King, but also having
| just had his mother die, I'm impressed at his composure. I
| suspect most of us would have snapped and shown far greater
| emotion.
| LightG wrote:
| Without trying to be mean, I'm less charitable. He's had
| a lifetime to prepare and the resources of money, power,
| staff and literally an entire nation to support him in
| his time of transition.
|
| I have deep compassion for him for the loss of his
| mother. I have zero compassion in terms of the position
| he finds himself in. With the support he has, he could
| run his life on auto-pilot. By comparison, I'm more
| impressed by the average Joe or Jane in the street
| holding down their lives (often alone) while coping with
| that loss. And I'm damned sure that a leaky pen wouldn't
| be their breaking point.
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| I get none, but then I don't follow crypto spivs.
|
| This isn't a Twitter problem, it's a symptom of the fact crypto
| is full of hucksters. If you lie down with dogs you get fleas.
| The rest of us have a 99% spam-free experience.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Honest question for people who still use Twitter: what keeps you
| on?
|
| I deleted my account half a decade ago and haven't missed it.
| kklisura wrote:
| Curated following list
| ljosifov wrote:
| People whose opinions I rate post write ideas that I find
| interesting. I use "Latest Tweets" timeline mostly - only
| sometimes check "Home" TL. Never follow any Topics or similar -
| strictly individual accounts. Block or mute annonimous and/or
| rude/ugly etc liberally.
| p_j_w wrote:
| I follow musicians/bands that I like to keep up to date on
| their album releases and touring schedules, people that I think
| are funny on Twitter to get the occasional good laugh, and some
| friends whose shitposting and occasional complaining about life
| I enjoy or sympathize with.
| angst_ridden wrote:
| I have a carefully curated list of people I follow and who
| follow me.
|
| I get a lot of value from one-on-one communication with tech
| expert, artists, authors, and musicians.
|
| It takes some work to keep the lists clean, and you have to
| access Twitter via a 3rd party app like Echofon to avoid all
| the ads and crap the company throws into your timeline, but
| it's definitely worth it to me.
| d23 wrote:
| I see essentially no spam because I don't follow accounts that
| would spam me or receive a lot of spam replies. The people I
| follow are interesting. That's about it.
| lanstin wrote:
| Yeah, exactly, I love learning about geology (esp
| sedimentation) and maths and medieval history and a bit of
| philosophy and some software stuff and a little tech business
| and conservation biology and a lot of various Star Trek
| accounts and a varying amount of news or political accounts
| and so on. If someone starts posting too much, I have to
| unfollow. I block all accounts that show me a sponsored post,
| and make sure to only do time-based time line. It's excellent
| content and fast propagation of news. I most often will link
| into y combinator posts from tweets.
|
| The only spam I've seen is on #hashtag searches, especially
| #covid19 (with, in 2020 a ton of k-pop spam for some reason)
| and various crypto folks (with more spam in replying to true
| believers than sceptics, make of that what you will).
| abvdasker wrote:
| If I'm being honest, I'm on Twitter for the pure schadenfreude
| of seeing public figures -- journalists, celebrities,
| politicians -- get publicly humiliated in real time, usually
| after saying something inadvertently funny or embarrassing. I'm
| not proud of it, but it has resulted in some of the funniest
| content I've ever seen on the internet.
| datagram wrote:
| - I'm in a large community where discussions primarily happen
| on Twitter.
|
| - There's a lot of really funny posts
|
| - Anything notable that happens on other platforms will make
| its way there pretty quickly
| mathlover2 wrote:
| Recently I intentionally got my Twitter account locked
| (specifically via a tweet insulting Trump Jr. which had gotten
| my friend's account locked when he posted it originally in
| response to Trump Jr.) so that I could keep my page (with links
| to my website and current social media accounts elsewhere) up
| while denying myself the temptation to ever participate in
| Twitter again.
|
| My mental health has skyrocketed and I have no regrets. If I
| need to read anything on Twitter I use Nitter or view Twitter
| through Brave with a custom ViolentMonkey filter to avoid that
| stupid "log in" pop-up.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| I filter out the twitter recommendation and vanity system as
| much as possible, sticking only to carefully chosen follows for
| things mostly unrelated to politics. I check it a couple of
| times a week and find it to be a lot more tolerable than before
| filtering while still allowing me to have an easy way to keep
| up with people I can't reasonably expect to move to platforms
| like the fediverse.
| soneca wrote:
| I follow people I like to read tweets from. I don't bother
| reading replies to the tweets I like. I don't tweet much. I
| don't participate in conversations. That's it. Twitter is
| pretty great for me. It is the only social media that I use
| actually.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| It is the fastest way to surface new information. For example
| this XKCD actually happened during the 2011 earthquake n
| Virginia. Folks in PA and NY saw the tweets before they felt
| it.
|
| https://xkcd.com/723/
|
| The news about the Osama bin Laden raid first broke on Twitter.
| The news of the Mar-a-Lago raid first broke on Twitter. News of
| Heartbleed first broke on Twitter.
|
| Every other platform has basically abandoned efforts to compete
| with Twitter in this area. Reporters are on Twitter because
| it's faster than their own news sites. Google piloted a "real
| time search" product and gave it up.
|
| In addition, I find a lot of hilarious humor content there.
| It's amazing what jokes can fit into 280 characters and a
| couple image or short video files.
| waylandsmithers wrote:
| I have a project that I want to get people to sign up for and
| it's kind of free marketing/advertising
| WA wrote:
| Some people post interesting things you can't find elsewhere.
| serial_dev wrote:
| Since you asked... I'm using my account because I'm a meetup
| organizer, podcast host (well currently on a bit of a longer
| break) and open source package author.
|
| I find that Twitter and LinkedIn still bring me and my projects
| visibility. It helps my career (though the ROI might be better
| on other activities, tbh) and some people joined my team
| because they knew me from Twitter/my podcast. Every once in a
| while when I finish a small library or host a meetup event, I
| publish them on Twitter.
|
| I don't engage in fights, I'm not an activist on the platform
| and I don't try to "growth-hack" and come up with cheesy
| threads to boost my profile. When people still try to start
| some fight on Twitter, I ignore their comment until they forget
| about it, especially if it comes from people who always stir up
| controversies. I don't block anyone, but I use the mute button
| often. I mute if someone posts threads, edgy hot takes and if
| someone is too political (even if I agree with them).
|
| There are good technical content from many of my follows, but
| somehow "thread spam" that's designed to inflate engagement
| numbers still leak into my feed. Political and social activism
| get into my feed, too. When this happens, I mute, unfollow,
| click "not interested" etc to keep my feed in an acceptable
| shape.
|
| I ignore messages asking me to do stuff for them for free,
| asking me to debug something, etc.
|
| The political commentators that I like, I browse without ever
| liking or retweeting their stuff.
|
| I feel that this way I get something out of being in these
| platforms without sacrificing my mental well being.
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| I don't follow anyone who even hints at crypto. That alone
| eliminates 99.999% of s(p|c)am.
| jononomo wrote:
| This is why I don't understand Gamer Gate -- the people
| affected by it just had the option of deleting their Twitter
| accounts and never missing it.
| [deleted]
| geerlingguy wrote:
| I use Tweetbot and only follow accounts with interesting tweets
| and/or friends I've met online or IRL. Having a chronological-
| only timeline is super helpful in avoiding the toxicity that's
| so prevalent for 'normal Twitter'.
|
| The few times I hit twitter.com, all I see is a Facebook-like
| list of popular/highly 'engaging' tweets, and all the
| interesting stuff I care about is buried somewhere deep in the
| infinite scroll.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| I mostly follow scientists and technology minded folks (who
| don't have anything to sell). Unfollow and block most politics
| oriented accounts. There are exceptions but for me I often walk
| away from twitter having learned something substantial.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _Honest question for people who still use Twitter: what keeps
| you on?_
|
| Content. It's the only form of social media I use.
|
| I don't really Tweet, I just consume. Once you follow people
| who are pros in subjects you enjoy, you can endlessly find
| content on the subject. No medium can react in real-time like
| Twitter. Plus, it's super convenient on the phone. As I
| mentioned in another comment, I hardly even notice any spam.
| alexb_ wrote:
| I'm in communities that function completely off of Twitter.
| Leaving twitter = you now know nothing about what's going on.
| abawany wrote:
| Best way to get customer service from brands. The CS at TMobile
| is terrible, for e.g., but their team on Twitter takes care of
| things properly and swiftly.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Twitter could combat it but doesn't. The same "did you check this
| out? <YouTube link>" message has been in every popular tweet for
| months now.
| firebaze wrote:
| Another Elon alias on HN revealed!
|
| /s
| [deleted]
| Graziano_M wrote:
| Try tweeting anything mentioning metamask.
| andrew_ wrote:
| Depending on the circles one frequents on Twitter, "blue checks"
| are trusted and respected, or mocked and distrusted. There's
| still no clear messaging on what it means, grants are seemingly
| arbitrary anymore. It's quite the debacle.
| DominoTree wrote:
| Similar all over Facebook as well - I've reported hundreds of
| scams using the exact same verbiage and images in sponsored
| posts, purporting to be Tesla or SpaceX or Amazon or so-forth
| selling new crypto tokens, using hacked verified pages. Would be
| trivial to detect if they cared. But beyond simply not caring,
| they're actually making money.
| joshstrange wrote:
| Twitter is unusable unless you are using a third-party client
| (which they don't give full access to). I sometimes tweet into
| the void about issues but rarely read twitter anymore except
| during something like an Apple event when I want to see what a
| handful of people are saying.
|
| Scrolling through my main feed (on the official web/client) is
| utter garbage. Sponsored-this, suggested-that, your-friend-liked,
| your-friend-also-follows, etc. Kill me. I want to read tweets
| from the specific people I follow, I don't need suggestions, I
| don't need the algorithm, I sure as hell don't care about
| followers-of-followers-type shit. The notifications I get from
| Twitter are also terrible, like I've given Twitter more than
| enough info over the last decade+ that it shouldn't be showing me
| certain suggested tweets (or whatever they call that block of
| random tweets they inject under a tweet I'm looking at).
|
| Twitter, like most large tech companies, astounds me. I literally
| have no clue what their thousands of employees/"engineers" do
| everyday. I work at a tiny company (<15 total, 6 developers) and
| it feels like we make way more forward progress in a month than
| twitter has in the last decade. For over 6 months they completely
| broke their browser notifications because someone renamed their
| Twitter account to "tweet" and so browser notifications would
| open that user's account instead of the tweet it was being linked
| to (the URL the browser would open would be something like
| /tweet?id=XXXXXXXX). It's fucking ametuer hour over there and
| they are wasting their time on adding things like podcasts to
| Twitter? They doesn't deserve to succeed.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| Cynical me is surprised the "blue checkmark = credibility" thing
| is starting to crumble. (Actual me can't help smile a bit.)
|
| However, I don't know what they can do here. They set up the
| system where the users respond to blue checkmarks positively.
| Adding another layer of blue checkmark is confusing and silly,
| but having it be gamed is also not good.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| The funniest part is that one of these spam accounts actually
| replied with the same spam _facepalm_. Lots of replies, all
| from what seem bot /spam accounts.
|
| The (verified) account bio is "Official Account of the
| Directorate of School Principals, School Supervisors, and
| Tendik, Directorate General of GTK, Ministry of Education and
| Culture, Research and Technology" (translated from Indonesian).
| It's probably a legit account that got compromised; tweets from
| a few days ago are all fine (and about Indonesian politics and
| the like).
|
| So basically, the problem isn't really with the blue checkmark
| _as such_ ; it's useful to verify this is an official
| government account rather than some random guy; the problem is
| this account got compromised somehow.
| lanstin wrote:
| And reporting "account taken over" is apparently not an
| option-niece had her account taken over on Instagram and I
| couldn't report it (the person started trying to get me to
| add an email to my insta account) as "account taken over" but
| only as "fraudulent account." Actual social accounts should
| be able to use ones contacts to verify account take-over and
| return it to the correct owner.
|
| For the people reporting these things on twitter, there is
| also "report an account" which is less clicks.
| lolinder wrote:
| Compromised or not, the blue checkmark is completely
| meaningless if you can change display names and not have to
| re-verify your account. Profile pictures I can see allowing
| for convenience, but what is the blue checkmark supposed to
| be certifying if not the person's name?
| datagram wrote:
| One of the main purposes atm for the verified checkmark is
| to prevent people from impersonating accounts by using
| usernames that visually look similar, e.g. @BillClinton vs
| @BiIIClinton
| cinntaile wrote:
| The solution is obvious, you get a golden checkmark if you're
| super verified.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| Extra verified (EV). Worked great for TLS (eye roll).
| orblivion wrote:
| Make it so that when they change their photo or display name or
| anything like that, they lose their blue checkmark, or maybe
| the blue checkmark has like a big question mark over it or
| something, until they get verified again.
| orblivion wrote:
| Looks like the spammers noticed Paul's tweet
| https://twitter.com/kspstk_gtk/status/1570094371009069056 lol
| [deleted]
| bitwize wrote:
| One of the bots is named AberBluehair. There's something very
| "how do you do, fellow young people" about that.
| HELLO. THIS IS MARY. I AM A HUMAN WITH SOFT SKIN.
|
| https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2000/01/28/move-over-hell
| _Adam wrote:
| That profile in particular is interesting. The first two
| tweets appear to be human originated, and date from December
| 2021. There are no tweets from the account until seven hours
| ago, and all the tweets after that point are spam.
|
| Several options:
|
| * Spammers creating accounts and posting human posts in
| advance knowing they'll be used for spam in the future
|
| * Account sold by the actual owner
|
| * Account compromised and repurposed for spamming
| nneonneo wrote:
| It's amusing to me that they end each fake reply with a string
| of four random letters. What better way to scream "I'm a bot"?
| dr_kiszonka wrote:
| I wonder what these strings are. Some sort of an ID? Or maybe
| to make these tweets sufficiently different from each other
| to avoid triggering spam detection?
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| I'd put my money on the second one
| [deleted]
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Why do you use it then? Honest question.
| skrowl wrote:
| Elon was right. WAAAAY more than < 10% of the users are bots.
| LightG wrote:
| Simplistic conclusion. I'd argue you're buying into the hype.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's the real users who never post vs bots who obviously post.
| gowld wrote:
| ethotool wrote:
| Isn't this one of the reasons why Elon Musk was interested in
| acquiring Twitter in the first place?
|
| To improve various aspects of the platform as a privately owned
| company and turn it more into a town square..?
|
| Nobody who is mentally all there has ever claimed that Twitter is
| perfect. It's just weird to me that everyone is acting surprised
| when the truth is Twitter has been getting hate since day one..
| markdown wrote:
| > Isn't this one of the reasons why Elon Musk was interested in
| acquiring Twitter in the first place?
|
| No, that's one of his "stated" reasons. His actual reason is
| unknown.
| squidbeak wrote:
| Fair complaint isn't hate.
| jpe90 wrote:
| Seems like a pretty decent time to exit social media entirely, I
| think.
| qwertox wrote:
| I can't use Twitter, I don't know how to use it. Sometimes I do
| these "latest" searches in order to see if GitHub or something
| else is down, or when there's a breaking news of worldwide
| relevance in order to get to know what's happening. But even
| these searches are 95% useless junk tweets in between of some
| relevant tweets.
|
| The "following"-thing hasn't worked for me for around a decade,
| there's just too much garbage in the stream or main page or
| whatever it is called.
|
| And for a couple of months now I've noticed that when I use it on
| a device which is not logged into Twitter, usually because a
| Reddit post leads me to it, it has agressive Instagram-like
| tactics in wanting you to log in or sign up and in that state has
| the same aggressive, unwelcoming vibe which Pinterest has.
|
| Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter.
| jsemrau wrote:
| Twitter IS a use case where relevant people post good insights.
|
| Yet, Twitter as a product lost focus many years ago what they
| want to be and for whom.
|
| The product has terrible discovery and search. Velocity is super-
| high so you are missing posts all the time (and people miss
| yours).
|
| And unless you have an audience already it is broken for 99% of
| the users for content distribution.
|
| Further, I am convinced that a lot of the reported "users" are
| copies of the same person behind it, bots, or apps.
|
| All of this was motivation that led into building finclout.
| Having identity/reputation managed on-chain IS a use case where
| blockchain makes sense. and is really important to understand if
| a source is credible or not. There is a lot of spam, fakes, and
| pumps on Twitter which makes most "social sentiment" ML models
| worthless.
| [deleted]
| jononomo wrote:
| I got banned for life from Twitter for tweeting "sheesh, I'd kill
| myself if I was still programming in java after age 50" (or
| something like that -- I've since deleted the tweet and can't
| remember the wording, but the gist is correct.)
|
| This was viewed as "encouraging self harm" so I got a lifetime
| ban.
|
| Yes, it was my second offense. A week or two earlier I had
| tweeted "I wish anti-vaxxers would go jump off a bridge". So that
| was two strikes and I got the lifetime ban instantly -- within
| less than two seconds -- while also being informed that my
| lifetime ban had been "after careful review".
|
| In any case, I'm a real human being and I can't use Twitter
| anymore.
|
| So the bots run free, but my obviously human account got a
| lifetime ban for tweets that could not possibly be seriously
| construed as dangerous. Honestly, the tweets are barely
| noteworthy. Also, I had something like 28 followers and I was
| little more than an occasional reply guy.
|
| Also, aside from the bots, the amount of absolutely ridiculously
| bad taste stuff I see tweeted that doesn't result in a lifetime
| ban is astonishing.
|
| Supposedly I can appeal my ban but I haven't done so because I'm
| dead certain that if I do I will just get an even more solid
| lifetime ban, along with all my personal details stored in their
| list of atrocious actors. I guess I'm holding out for Elon Musk
| to be forced to buy Twitter and for some changes to take place.
| Chinjut wrote:
| Twitter's moderation, like every major such website, is a
| Kafkaesque nightmare with little transparency or review. It
| would all be fine if they just deleted individual posts. Then
| it'd be no big deal on an occasional bad call. But nuking
| accounts in this slipshod way is terrible.
| NoFactualActual wrote:
| I'm not sure it's "spam" if you have to find it. Surely twitter
| ads are far closer to email spam than someone impersonating
| another person.
| barnbuilder wrote:
| The spammers impersonate famous people and then spam the
| replies of other famous people, for example the fake Vitalik in
| the OP is a reply to one of paulg's tweets.
|
| If you read the threads under certain people's tweets (or
| anyone's tweets containing cryptocurrency related keywords) you
| will have no choice but to wade through copious amounts of this
| muck.
| ks2048 wrote:
| I don't know if it's considered "spam", but another super-
| annoying thing is when you have to scroll past a whole page of
| "@downloadbot" or whatever those video-download bots are named.
| If you want to allow those kinds of things, why are they visible
| for everyone?
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Here's a search for tweets from verified accounts offering this
| specific Ethereum scam:
|
| https://twitter.com/search?q=filter%3Averified%20%22giving%2...
| TonyTrapp wrote:
| I wonder how some of those can be verified accounts at all.
| They appear to have been hijacked just hours ago, their
| original content and followers are still there. The rules for
| Twitter Verification say "Demonstrate your account has a
| follower count in the top .05% of active accounts located in
| the same geographic region" yet some of these accounts just
| have a few hundred followers. Surely 300 followers cannot be in
| the top .05% of active accounts in, say, Indonesia?
|
| Edit: The best one so far, replying to @POTUS:
| https://twitter.com/IYCKarnataka/status/1570126180791242753
| colatkinson wrote:
| I don't think the follower count being that high is a hard
| requirement. The sentence in full:
|
| > Follower or Mention Count: If your account is detected to
| be in the top .05% follower or mention count for your
| geographic location, it _may count towards notability
| evidence for certain categories_.
|
| Emphasis mine.
|
| The other listed sources of "notability" are things like news
| coverage, IMDB references, and Google Trends. So for example,
| an elderly state senator who "never quite figured out the
| socials" would not have millions of followers, but would be
| eligible for verification because they are notable for other
| reasons.
|
| The follower count thing seems more like a bolster for
| influencers and such. They won't have industry references,
| given that they aren't really in an industry per se, and they
| won't probably won't end up on the front page of the NYT just
| for having lots of followers. But nonetheless, it's in the
| best interest of both the influencer and Twitter to avoid
| having phonies of the influencer promoting scams.
| georgiecasey wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if someone responsible for verifying
| accounts in Indonesia took a bribe.
| bombcar wrote:
| What do you bet a KPM for some manager somewhere is number
| of new verified accounts?
| [deleted]
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| My first question was, "Who the hell is Vitalik?"
| aaroninsf wrote:
| Idle question,
|
| I have always assumed screen name and badge are just-in-time,
| reflective of present account settings, modulo caching etc., and
| not pinned so to speak to their state at the time of a Tweet.
|
| It's got to be the case, or you could just keep flip-flopping and
| have a dialog with yourself that looked at a glance like an
| actual interchange (until the account handle was examined)...
| LightG wrote:
| It's bad for blue checks, I've never had an issue!
|
| Forgive me for not being that sympathetic.
|
| Interesting how it's becoming a major issue now (I mean, it has
| always has been for big accounts) since the Musky Douchey Hypeman
| requires it to be a major issue in the upcoming court case.
|
| Personally, advertise yourself with the stench of manure and
| expect horseflies.
| illuminerdy wrote:
| I don't think you needed to include "The spam on".
|
| The statement works just as well without it.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| People are outraged at kiwifarms and their users allegedly
| driving people to suicide, but twitter's "body count" is much
| higher than probably any other site. Where's the outrage for
| that??
| [deleted]
| the_doctah wrote:
| I'm confused, it sounds like you're asking for more censorship
| on Twitter, which is not even the subject at hand. Unless
| you're suggesting bots are killing people.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| It's worth noting that Paul posted this thought to Twitter.
|
| For as much as everyone complains about Twitter, there is
| obviously value in the product.
| system16 wrote:
| Comically, when I view this tweet in my browser, at the top right
| in the "Relevant people" box that Twitter wants me to pay
| attention to and follow is _another_ fake yet verified Vitalik
| account.
|
| Honest question: what do Twitter's army of engineers and
| designers actually do every day? The site is slow, the UI is god
| awful, and the spam is - as this tweet points - appalling.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Heh - in the Relevant people box I've started getting people
| who I've blocked, and have blocked me!
| sbierwagen wrote:
| >and the spam is - as this tweet points - appalling.
|
| Incentives. If the expected value of a single spam message is
| in the micropennies, then you have to send enormous volumes of
| them, which can easily be detected by automated tools.
|
| Cryptocurrency changes this. Now an account hack can net the
| attacker millions of dollars. This means you can send many
| fewer messages and invest much more time in each of them.
| claytongulick wrote:
| Activism.
| [deleted]
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _The site is slow, the UI is god awful, and the spam is - as
| this tweet points - appalling._
|
| I've probably used Twitter for 1 hour+ per day, every day, for
| years. I hardly even notice the spam. What am I doing wrong? Is
| it targeting specific niches? Clearly something is working.
| paulgb wrote:
| Nor sure why you're being downvoted, it's perfectly possible
| to never encounter this stuff on Twitter. If you encounter
| tweets by crypto-adjacent people (Elon Musk, etc.) or that
| mention crypto themes, and view the replies, you'll easily
| find spam, but if you don't do that you might never encounter
| it.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| My favorite example of that is that the people you might want
| to follow box recommends people you're following already.
| mousetree wrote:
| You still might want to follow the people you're already
| following
| cowtools wrote:
| You might want to keep following th- WAIT COME BACK DON'T
| LEAVE
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| > what do Twitter's army of engineers and designers actually do
| every day?
|
| They work on more dark patterns to force you to give your phone
| number or to create an account to read a tweet.
| cowtools wrote:
| Yes, as someone who does international travel and frequently
| switches phone numbers, dealing with phone-based 2FA
| """security""" is a major problem for me. At least I will not
| waste time on their website.
|
| I just never give my phone number out anymore, no matter what
| because it will be used against me. Even google is trying to
| hold my account hostage, luckily they have an email
| forwarding feature so I no longer need to log in.
| smoe wrote:
| My problem with twitter is not even user spam, but twitters own
| engagement spam, it seems to be impossible to just see the
| content of people I follow
|
| I recently signed up first time after like 8 years to follow a
| handful of interesting accounts. But only maybe 20% of stuff I
| see is actually from them, the rest is all suggestions by twitter
| what people/topics I should follow or what people that the people
| I follow follow posted, etc. And there only seems to be ways to
| show "fewer" of something, not get rid of it altogether.
| Completely useless. I reckon there are third party apps and
| browser extensions to filter this, but since I don't care about
| those few accounts I follow enough either, I couldn't be bothered
| and deleted my account again.
| knocknock wrote:
| if you switch from the "Home" timeline to the "Latest Tweets"
| timeline, you should only see things from people you follow.
| fknorangesite wrote:
| You can switch between "Home" (default, what you're describing)
| and "Latest" (what you want) feeds.
|
| I'm not sure about a mobile app, if that's what you're using,
| but on web at least it's the stars-icon-button in the top right
| of the feed.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| The only way Twitter is usable to me is using the 'Better
| Twitter' browser extension, which filters out most of their
| recommendation stuff.
| mzs wrote:
| I think twitter wants you to make a list for that.
| bombcar wrote:
| YouTube has suddenly encountered a rash of "comment reply
| scam/spam" where if you reply to a famous YouTuber someone with
| the same profile picture will reply almost instantly with a
| generic thank you / won a prize type comment and try to get you
| to use telegram or discord. It's all so pitiful.
|
| As for Twitter the check mark might actually be useful if it
| disappeared the moment you changed your "display name" but we
| can't have that!
| cwkoss wrote:
| > As for Twitter the check mark might actually be useful if it
| disappeared the moment you changed your "display name" but we
| can't have that!
|
| That would be a very smart policy, but twitter is too afraid of
| inconveniencing psuedojournalist professional hand wringers and
| their pressing need to update their display names with the
| emoji that shows they Care about the important issue of the
| month.
|
| Or to be even more blasphemous, perhaps Twitter should hire
| humans to review changes to bluechecks' display names.
| lbriner wrote:
| Then here's an idea. Have a profile picture and have a person
| picture. You can change one and not the other.
|
| You're welcome Twitter, no need to thank or pay me (unless
| you want to of course!)
| bko wrote:
| The worst thing is that the workflow to report spam has gotten
| a lot worse since the last 6 months. Now it takes 9 clicks
|
| 1. three dots
|
| 2. report spam
|
| 3. welcome message start report
|
| 4. who is this report for? myself, some specific group,
| everyone (??)
|
| 5. general info (attacked b/c of identity, harassed, spam, ...
| )
|
| 6. how is he doing this? (Posting misleading or deceptive
| links, leading to scams, phishing, or other malicious links, +6
| more similarly verbose)
|
| 7. yes continue
|
| 8. submit
|
| 9. done
|
| It used to be like 2 or 3 about 6 months ago but I remember
| after Musk started complaining they responded by somehow making
| it worse.
|
| Also most of the reports are centered around harassment or
| racist comments when 90% of the bad content on twitter most
| people deal with is straight up scams. There should just be a
| big this is spam button.
| anvic wrote:
| How much do you get paid to do content moderation for Google?
| It may be a good side hustle if the pay is good.
| hellomyguys wrote:
| There's a downside to making it easy to report content. You
| just end up with a bunch of useless reports.
| alecco wrote:
| In the past year I reported many of these. The most common
| pattern was some WhatsApp number with funny characters. In
| most cases the message stays there.
|
| I can't believe it's not easy to filter those. Who uses 10
| consecutive weird chars in a message of 15 chars? And most of
| those are numbers.
|
| I stopped reporting because clearly YouTube doesn't care. And
| there was a more clear case a couple of years ago with
| inappropriate comments using sexualized emojis. YouTube did
| nothing until the outrage got to the press. It's like they
| only focus in finding excuses to demonetize people leaning
| into wrongthink.
| drtz wrote:
| My pessimistic view: making it too easy to report spam may
| highlight how much spam there actually is on Twitter.
| Something the company definitely does not want to do at the
| moment.
| gcmac wrote:
| I wonder if their A/B test showed that this was somehow
| "solving" the "spam of spam reports" problem. It would be
| fairy naive but I could envision a world where they tested
| this out, saw fewer (but more detailed) spam reports and
| concluded that the prior distribution of spam reports was
| itself not reliable (e.g overcounted the problem).
|
| This is obviously self-serving but seems like it may at
| least be a "consistent" world view where they aren't
| totally cynical.
| bko wrote:
| It's just bad UX and confusing. Consider this question
| "Who is this report for?". Here are the options:
|
| 1. Myself
|
| 2. Someone else or a specific group of people
|
| -- This Tweet is directed at or mentions someone else or
| a specific group of people -- like racial or religious
| groups. Everyone on Twitter
|
| 3. This Tweet isn't targeting a specific person or group,
| but it affects everyone on Twitter -- like misleading
| info or sensitive content.
|
| For the same Vitalik spam tweet you see everywhere, I'm
| guessing 3, but its kind of weird question
|
| Then "Everyone on Twitter is being ..."
|
| 1. Attacked because of their identity
|
| 2. Slurs, misgendering, racist or sexist stereotypes,
| encouraging others to harass, sending hateful imagery
| Harassed or intimidated with violence
|
| 3. Sexual harassment, group harassment, insults or name
| calling, posting private info, threatening to expose
| private info, violent event denial, violent threats,
| celebration of violent acts
|
| 4. Spammed
|
| 5. Posting malicious links, misusing hashtags, fake
| engagement, repetitive replies, Retweets, or Direct
| Messages. Shown content related to or encouraged to self-
| harm
|
| 6. Shown misleading info
|
| 7. Offered tips or currency -- or encouraged to send them
| -- in a way that's deceptive or promotes or causes harm
|
| I guess spammed, but I'm pretty sure its a malicious link
| and misleading, so either 4 or 5 or 6
|
| Then, "How is [?]@... doing this?"
|
| 1. Posting misleading or deceptive links, leading to
| scams, phishing, or other malicious links
|
| 2. Misusing hashtags, such as unrelated hashtags and
| large number of hashtags
|
| 3. Sending a lot of aggressive, unwanted, repetitive or
| unrelated replies, Retweets, or Direct Messages
|
| 4. Fake engagement, such as aggressively Retweeting or
| buying and selling Likes, replies, or other Twitter
| features
|
| 5. Using multiple accounts to interact or coordinate with
| other people to manipulate accounts, Tweets, or other
| Twitter features
|
| 6. Following and then unfollowing large numbers of
| accounts so to inflate follower count
|
| 7. Something else
|
| I guess its a deceptive link, but I'm not sure because I
| didn't click on it. I also didn't click 5 on the previous
| step which was "posting malicious links", I clicked
| spammed. But he's also using repetitive or unrelated
| replies so maybe 3 as well? And almost certainly the
| person running the scam is using multiple accounts.
|
| That's a lot of words to read every time, and I'm pretty
| sure it has changed since I started reporting stuff
| regularly.
| bombcar wrote:
| These questions are the kind of questions you put up when
| you want to funnel some (or most) of the reports into the
| trash can.
|
| One thing Twitter certainly has to deal with is hordes of
| people reporting tweets, even if they're "ok" - I have to
| believe every single Trump tweet received hundreds if not
| thousands of reports immediately upon posting.
| badwolf wrote:
| Similarly on Instagram it's the sudden slew of "promote it on
| <spamaccount>" type comments. Dozens of them within minutes of
| posting anything.
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| And "+18" profiles viewing your Stories, with links to shady
| sites in the bio.
|
| They're so similar to each other that manual rules would
| suffice to cull them, AI my ass.
| asddubs wrote:
| youtube is a pit of spam in general. Basically any bigger
| video, every single comment that's even just somewhat high up
| either has a respond that says something like "check this out
| <video link>" or "see here <video link>", or a comment left by
| someone with a username along the lines of "click my profile
| picture for my pics" with a suggestive avatar
| Aunche wrote:
| I'm also seeing a lot of spam comments pretending to be organic
| conversation about the market, which eventually leads to you to
| a "financial advisor" with an oddly unique name that is easy to
| Google, which leads you to a sketchy website.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| I just got my channel added to an 'alpha' of their new spam
| prevention algorithm... and it seems to be working so far
| (fingers crossed).
|
| I was getting around 300 spam replies to comments on my videos
| per week up until the alpha started--now I'm getting 0. So
| maybe they finally cracked that nut, but I won't count my
| chickens before they're hatched.
|
| I still run YT-Spammer-Purge[1] daily, but it's come up dry for
| the past week now.
|
| [1] https://github.com/ThioJoe/YT-Spammer-Purge
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| > As for Twitter the check mark might actually be useful if it
| disappeared the moment you changed your "display name" but we
| can't have that!
|
| Just requiring 2FA for checkmarked accounts and an ID
| confirmation to remove said 2FA would eliminate 90% of the
| scams already.
| wnevets wrote:
| Games Nexus did an entire video [1] about it and even paid the
| scammer. Apparently the scammers heavily downvoted the video.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqPPWO7kWu4
| lantry wrote:
| sure, but one false positive and it's "I got banned from twitter
| for no reason! muh freedom of speech!"
|
| Moderation will never be perfect, and IMO it's better to err on
| the false negative side
| eminence32 wrote:
| Real humans being caught up in anti-spam measures would be much
| easier to stomach if there was a sane way to talk to a human at
| Twitter and get the ban reversed.
| cwkoss wrote:
| The vitalik spoofing spam bots are such low hanging fruit. They
| should really just auto shadow ban anyone using his profile
| picture besides the real vitalik. (And probably elon musk too..)
|
| I wonder if its an issue of being tangled up in internal
| bureaucracy, or not wanting to implement one-off solutions to
| glaring issues that can't be generalized. Certainly a management
| failure somewhere.
| bombcar wrote:
| They'd just change the image and name slightly to pass the
| filters.
| rajeshp1986 wrote:
| what if real Vitalik decides to put the picture of a dog on his
| profile pic? It would effectively shadow ban every user who has
| a dog picture.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| I suspect it's because there are many completely different
| Twitter "communities". The obvious stuff you see all the time
| is completely different from the low hanging fruit I'd list
| off.
|
| I do wish they'd ban blue emojis at the start and end of
| display names. I see that all the time logged in or logged out.
| togaen wrote:
| Maybe twitter likes the spam. It gets people like Paul Graham to
| complain about it _on twitter_ thereby generating more user
| engagement and ad revenue. Keep up the good work, Paul.
| drusepth wrote:
| The crypto spam on Twitter has really exploded the past couple
| weeks in particular for me. Seems like every single day I now get
| multiple @-mention spam notifications from one-off accounts
| seemingly specializing in just mentioning hundreds/thousands (or
| more) of users in replies to crypto scams/tweets/offers/etc.
| robswc wrote:
| I'm a casual twitter user (unfortunately) and the verification
| badge really is an issue. You see that way before you see the
| grey "actual name" and before that, you see the nickname which is
| basically the name of the impersonators target.
|
| It's pretty obvious when you read it with common sense but when
| you initially see it, it looks legit.
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