14 ms·

Twitter Takes Aim at Anonymous Egg Accounts

81 points by redraga 10y ago

unethical_ban 10y ago
Today, the egg, tomorrow, unverified account names. Are they going full Facebook? And filtering out keywords in messages... I suppose that's ok, and certainly their prerogative, but talk about creating more social bubbles. As much as I disagree with the random twits on the site, it reminds me that not everyone is a left-leaning political hobbyist. Hearing things you don't necessarily like is part of being an adult.
- tptacek 10y ago
  No, giving people the option of not seeing patterns of accounts isn't "full Facebook".
- sarvinc 10y ago
  Sure but harassment isn't. My understanding is that all of this is optional. As long as anonymous accounts are not abused there's no reason to filter them out. If anonymous accounts are abused people will filter them out. Thus the only people we have to blame are the abusers of anonymous accounts.
- eropple 10y ago
  Having concerted bombs of right-wing harassment drop on one's head for having the temerity to do something like "be a woman with political opinions" is not part of being an adult. And that's the reality of Twitter right now. This isn't nearly enough; actually showing the trackable legions of smurf-account harassers the door might be beyond Twitter's meager capabilities at the moment (after all, they only have a small army of developers, right?), but implementing BlockTogether as a first-party tool, including "automatically block accounts under X days old that @ me", is just part of being a decent host.
  - iamatworknow 10y ago
    The question then becomes is the necessity of having a twitter account "part of being an adult"? I'm not saying the harassment is right, mind you, and certainly doxxing and real physical threats should be treated as the criminal acts that they are, but I don't think it's something that can ever really be remedied unless the victim removes themselves from the situation. As I see it there is a sort of give and take relationship with inherently public social media like twitter. Your comments and thoughts are presented to a wide audience, but that inherently subjects you to possible dissenting opinions or harassment from that audience. The alternative is to, say, create a personal blog. You could write your opinions all day there and nobody will judge them or attack you for them, because without a lot of effort in SEO and marketing, nobody will ever see them. Most people oppose bullying in school because kids "have" to go to school, so in a sense they're forced into the environment and should not be subject to attacks there. But who is forcing you to be on twitter?
    - eropple 10y ago
      > The question then becomes is the necessity of having a twitter account "part of being an adult"? I'm not saying the harassment is right, mind you, and certainly doxxing and real (as in tangible) physical threats should be treated as the criminal acts that they are, but I don't think it's something that can ever really be remedied unless the victim removes themselves from the situation. Oh, then we should just give up and let literal white supremacists and anti-feminists and gay-bashers chase the weakest among us out of the social discourse. I'm sure that isn't a political tactic being employed intentionally against them or anything. Or, you know, we can fucking not do that. Stop normalizing evil. Doing so literally-not-figuratively arms those who would do harm to the people among us who need our support. Show them the door, not their victims.
      - iamatworknow 10y ago
        These people have always existed. They will continue to exist. They will continue to find ways to harass the people they see as easy targets because they find enjoyment in it. Nothing you can say or do, no policies twitter puts in place, will ever eradicate them. At best it will slow them down. There's always some work around and they have lives sad enough to dedicate to finding these work-arounds. For all of human existence up until last decade, these types of people didn't have a wide social outlet for their thoughts, just like everyone else didn't. Now it's open to everyone. Yes, it's morally reprehensible. But this is not something that we or any social media company can ever solve. It will always be a cat and mouse game. But it's a game that you don't have to play. You can still be a citizen of the 21st century world and not be on social media. It does not put you at any disadvantage to not have a twitter account. If you believe that it would, reconsider your priorities in life.
  - tomjen3 10y ago
    Do you think Twitter should have a shared default blocklist? That would kill Twitter almost immediately as everybody is added to the list (if nothing else, as a retaliation for somebody else adding them to the list) or do you mean that they should have the slightly more intelligent blocking features it has (including young accounts and/or accounts with few followers)? Because they are pretty easy to bypass by having a bunch of accounts follow each other and create them well ahead of time (and no Twitter can't prevent this: finding cliques in a graph is NP-Complete, and Twitters graph is crazy big). Twitter could add many things, but they haven't even figured out that they need to accounts with female names and portraits and user names that ends in a number, even though they are always spammers.
    - eropple 10y ago
      I think shared blocklists are great. As defaults, probably not. I don't use any shared lists because nobody's going to take a serious run at me, I just don't want to spike my blood pressure seeing the egg/anime smurf accounts well-actually at me. But I think network-effect block lists are probably a good idea. Nobody who follows Sargon of Akkad or other white-supremacist dorks is somebody I am ever going to want to hear from, so tube their tweets. That sort of thing.
  - intoverflow2 10y ago
    > including "automatically block accounts under X days old that @ me" How can a new user (who isn't a harasser) engage with the Twitter service if they get auto-blocked when they try to engage with anyone on the platform?
    - eropple 10y ago
      Personally? I interact with people I know, not #brands. And I do that by following, not by @'ing out of the blue. Everybody I know does the same. If somebody with a name I recognize follows me, I'm gonna follow them back and @'ing is fine.
      - liquidise 10y ago
        What you are describing is a tinder approach to twitter, which serve fundamentally different roles in the online social sphere. I understand that is how you and yours use twitter, but extrapolating that behavior across hundreds of millions of users is almost certainly hasty.
      - intoverflow2 10y ago
        > I interact with people I know I prefer have far less public services for this. Feels like airing dirty laundry to do it on twitter
    - epistasis 10y ago
      > when they try to engage with _anyone_ on the platform But it's not anyone, it's only those that are under assault and have turned on the block. How many people are going to do that? Only the people that need it to continue using Twitter.
    - rhizome 10y ago
      If "engage" means "HA HA U SUK TRUMP UR AZZ MAKE ME A SANDWICH" then maybe Twitter isn't a good place for them.
      - strken 10y ago
  - moonshinefe 10y ago
    I believe what he was getting at is as an adult, you should be able to realize that a website on the internet is just that--and have the ability to take it with a grain of salt without being highly offended / outraged. I don't think the intention was to say everyone on Twitter are adults--in fact it's the complete opposite of that. It's a platform where you can get both the best and the worst from all walks of life across the world. Sometimes there will be jerks and people who are the polar opposite ideologically to what you agree with.
    - nikdaheratik 10y ago
      And the point is that disagreement isn't what runs people off that platform. It's abusive behavior by large groups of people (and sometimes their bots) towards whoever they don't like.
- FussyZeus 10y ago
  Where've you been? Twitter's been trying to become Facebook for years.
- tomjen3 10y ago
  Please show me an intelligent left-wing and an intelligent-right wing person, both of consistently post well reasoned and well argued content from their perspectives. It doesn't matter what side they are on, all that gets shared on twitter that would qualify as political is absolutely nauseating waving that sides flag and telling the world how stupid the other side is. It would be better if it was blocked, preferably by default.
- m-p-3 10y ago
  They're Digg-ing themselves.
wildpeaks 10y ago
I hope they took into account that blind users usually also don't upload avatars.
- 27182818284 10y ago
  It isn't just about blocking those that haven't uploaded avatars. Egg users stick out because they have other properties such as New account follows a lot quickly, but doesn't have followers New account that with time never ever tweets, only retweets and follows New account that starts and then immediately follows just a single person ever. All of those are suspicious
  - bussierem 10y ago
    >New account follows a lot quickly, but doesn't have followers >New account that with time never ever tweets, only retweets and follows Both of these are also the behavior of people who use Twitter simply as a content stream. They pretty accurately describe how I use Twitter.
    - ceejayoz 10y ago
      Given the penalty is limited reach, sounds like there'd be no effect on your use case.
    - maxerickson 10y ago
      So no one will see the tweets you already aren't tweeting?
- raverbashing 10y ago
  Some do upload
james_pm 10y ago
Next they'll want proof that the person in the avatar is actually you.
- vorotato 10y ago
  my avatar is a potato, so that would be difficult. Do I just show a potato?
  - notadoc 10y ago
    Maybe you'll have to show Twitter your state ID with the official potato picture identifying you as a potato.
  - rayvd 10y ago
    Depends. Are you a potato?
arprocter 10y ago
Interested to see how penalizing accounts for 'repeatedly tweeting at non-followers' is going to work when most of what I see on the platform is people messaging celebs who don't follow them back
- 65827 10y ago
  This is what I was going to post, seems to be about 90% of the activity on twitter. They seem to only care about the experience from the perspective of the haves, anyone else just isn't part of the conversation.
  - jsonne 10y ago
    I think this is a good example of how optimizing for the power user, at a large scale, can actually be detrimental.
    - xadhominemx 10y ago
      How do you know that? The changes have not yet taken effect.
      - Drumlin 10y ago
        One of the main problems with Twitter is people sign up and don't know what to do with it - except message famous people. If Twitter prevents the plebs from shouting at the intelligentsia then it will make the platform even more irrelevant. The last time I used it, it was like talking into a void and that was with hundreds of real followers.
  - ceejayoz 10y ago
    Nothing's going to change for these users, though. Their shouting at random celebs will go unseen, as it always has.
- Mendenhall 10y ago
  Yea thats pretty much all twitter is. I think of all the people tweeting politicians etc.
donatj 10y ago
The keyword filtering strikes me as the most filter bubble inducing thing I've heard in a while.
nmgsd 10y ago
A cool way to circumvent the keyword filtering: www.seecret.io
birdman3131 10y ago
So because I see no reason to upload a photo my 7 year old twitter account is now considered second rate whereas the bot account created last week is not because it was updated to upload a random profile image. Seems a bit like trying to claim they are doing something while nothing important gets done.
- tomjen3 10y ago
  I hope they are smarter than that. Don't forget the Gell-Man effect amnesia effect.
tomjen3 10y ago
Dammit. I thought I could now remove any tweet that had the word 'trump' in it[^2], which meant I could refollow a bunch of people and make twitter much more useful, but it seems that it only works for notifications in which you are mentioned[1], which means the feature is pretty pointless, at least for most people. [1]:https://support.twitter.com/articles/20175032 https://support.twitter.com/articles/20175032 [^2]: this is a complaint I have with almost any social media, even google plus. I want a persons insight on subject x, I don't want to hear their political ramblings, no matter what side they are on - politics are poison.
- ceejayoz 10y ago
  A lot of third-party clients implement this properly. Tweetbot's my favorite.
ad-hominem 10y ago
Oh, wired, your insistence that I not use an ad blocker on your site is actually the reason I am never visiting your site again.
kobayashi 10y ago
No mention of how filtering might apply to Twitter's trending algorithms. Since much of the activities of bots are aimed at pushing a narrative to a wider audience (getting it trending), it seems like Twitter is currently neglecting one of the most serious harms that bots pose to the community. I get that Twitter is focusing on harassment in order to make people feel safe when using their platform, but I hope the solution will also effect this other aspect of bot use/account abuse.
rconti 10y ago
Pretty sure my only use case for Twitter is to tweet at non-followers, eg "get customer service".
notadoc 10y ago
There are massive bot farms on Twitter that are obvious to even casual observers and most of them don't have "egg" accounts anymore. Look at the auto-replies to any political tweet, major news story, or from a popular account, all automated garbage that follows the same template. Why Twitter ignores the crap which pollutes their product is amazing to me. Maybe they don't want to touch them because it ups the engagement numbers and inflates active users?
- nkrisc 10y ago
  Surely they can recognize the downsides of a bubble of inflated engagement metrics waiting to burst? Willful ignorance?
- deeth_starr 10y ago
  I'd like to see country of origin for tweets/accounts. I know this can be worked around with a vpn, but it's a start.
  - tokenizerrr 10y ago
    That would be wherever the cheapest servers can be bought. Or just random open proxies.
- Grollicus 10y ago
  "500.000 new Members last month!!1" (I just totally made that up) I suspect its the same as facebooks "2 Billion Users" - its just good for PR to have huge numbers. If you look too closely you might even lose Members in a Month, and we all know "growth" is very important..
  - teej 10y ago
    Facebook and I believe Twitter report Monthly Active Users. This isn't some smoke and mirrors number. Sure, bots may count in this number, but they aren't referencing total signups when they say "Users" like you imply.
ghettoCoder 10y ago
Faster please. Anything that accelerates Twitter's demise is ok in my books. Bonus points if wounds are self-inflicted. I'm old enough to remember when you only had to deal with the crazies holding signs and hollering if you went to certain parts of town. If you didn't go and/or engage the crazies they didn't really exist. Sort of like if a tree falls but nobody is there... Now everyone thinks their opinion is valuable and spouts nonsense all over Twitter. Time to take away the soapbox.
monksy 10y ago
What I don't understand: Why doesn't twitter take moderation seriously? On reddit it's left up to the moderators of each sub. It does very. But having a very "up to interpretation" but yet not politically biased set of rules and enforcement is great. We don't have a code of conduct or any of the nonsense. Someone violates it and we catch it, they're gone. (Also that's subjective to time based on how many times we caught them as well) End of.
- pjc50 10y ago
  I'd love them to take moderation seriously, but it couldn't scale and there's no natural "partitions" between communities of interest with different norms, so you can't delegate it to users. They've only just managed to deal with the most high profile example of "brigading".
snissn 10y ago
Just got this today: Good day there! How are you today? I am a girl who just moved to live in this city! I have done a search on Twitter to look for man in our area and yeah I found your Twitter. In case you don't mind we can make friend and chat chit! Do you have snapchat? Please add me on Snapchat nick: [redacted] so we will chat and I can show you my personal photos! I don't like to chitchat here:) It's boring! Lets Snapchat! Sometimes I also use another Snapchat nick: [redacted] on another cellphone, kindly add this nick too if you did not see me online on Snapchat nick: [redacted] :) Hope to chat with you really soon.
- cdelsolar 10y ago
  I mean maybe she just found you really appealing.
  - snissn 10y ago
    Aw shucks, you think? Thanks :)
- Sacho 10y ago
  That's a lot of tweets(5+). Did you get them all at the same time, or did they have some kind of randomized delay? Also uh...what's the benefit of spamming you out of Twitter and into Snapchat? Do people get $$ for views of their snapchat images, or something?
lutusp 10y ago
Translation: "Wired takes aim at people running ad blockers."
rafaelm 10y ago
I see Twitter is getting harder and harder to use anonymously. As someone living under a totalitarian government that is tightening its grip everyday on free speech and the internet in general, this worries me. Trying to signup and use Twitter using Tor is practically impossible. I understand the spam problem on Twitter is out of control,but I wish there was a way to use it anonymously.

81 points by redraga 10y ago

Today, the egg, tomorrow, unverified account names. Are they going full Facebook? And filtering out keywords in messages... I suppose that's ok, and certainly their prerogative, but talk about creating more social bubbles. As much as I disagree with the random twits on the site, it reminds me that not everyone is a left-leaning political hobbyist. Hearing things you don't necessarily like is part of being an adult.

tptacek 10y ago
No, giving people the option of not seeing patterns of accounts isn't "full Facebook".
sarvinc 10y ago
Sure but harassment isn't. My understanding is that all of this is optional. As long as anonymous accounts are not abused there's no reason to filter them out. If anonymous accounts are abused people will filter them out. Thus the only people we have to blame are the abusers of anonymous accounts.
eropple 10y ago
Having concerted bombs of right-wing harassment drop on one's head for having the temerity to do something like "be a woman with political opinions" is not part of being an adult. And that's the reality of Twitter right now. This isn't nearly enough; actually showing the trackable legions of smurf-account harassers the door might be beyond Twitter's meager capabilities at the moment (after all, they only have a small army of developers, right?), but implementing BlockTogether as a first-party tool, including "automatically block accounts under X days old that @ me", is just part of being a decent host.
- iamatworknow 10y ago
  The question then becomes is the necessity of having a twitter account "part of being an adult"? I'm not saying the harassment is right, mind you, and certainly doxxing and real physical threats should be treated as the criminal acts that they are, but I don't think it's something that can ever really be remedied unless the victim removes themselves from the situation. As I see it there is a sort of give and take relationship with inherently public social media like twitter. Your comments and thoughts are presented to a wide audience, but that inherently subjects you to possible dissenting opinions or harassment from that audience. The alternative is to, say, create a personal blog. You could write your opinions all day there and nobody will judge them or attack you for them, because without a lot of effort in SEO and marketing, nobody will ever see them. Most people oppose bullying in school because kids "have" to go to school, so in a sense they're forced into the environment and should not be subject to attacks there. But who is forcing you to be on twitter?
  - eropple 10y ago
    > The question then becomes is the necessity of having a twitter account "part of being an adult"? I'm not saying the harassment is right, mind you, and certainly doxxing and real (as in tangible) physical threats should be treated as the criminal acts that they are, but I don't think it's something that can ever really be remedied unless the victim removes themselves from the situation. Oh, then we should just give up and let literal white supremacists and anti-feminists and gay-bashers chase the weakest among us out of the social discourse. I'm sure that isn't a political tactic being employed intentionally against them or anything. Or, you know, we can fucking not do that. Stop normalizing evil. Doing so literally-not-figuratively arms those who would do harm to the people among us who need our support. Show them the door, not their victims.
    - iamatworknow 10y ago
      These people have always existed. They will continue to exist. They will continue to find ways to harass the people they see as easy targets because they find enjoyment in it. Nothing you can say or do, no policies twitter puts in place, will ever eradicate them. At best it will slow them down. There's always some work around and they have lives sad enough to dedicate to finding these work-arounds. For all of human existence up until last decade, these types of people didn't have a wide social outlet for their thoughts, just like everyone else didn't. Now it's open to everyone. Yes, it's morally reprehensible. But this is not something that we or any social media company can ever solve. It will always be a cat and mouse game. But it's a game that you don't have to play. You can still be a citizen of the 21st century world and not be on social media. It does not put you at any disadvantage to not have a twitter account. If you believe that it would, reconsider your priorities in life.
- tomjen3 10y ago
  Do you think Twitter should have a shared default blocklist? That would kill Twitter almost immediately as everybody is added to the list (if nothing else, as a retaliation for somebody else adding them to the list) or do you mean that they should have the slightly more intelligent blocking features it has (including young accounts and/or accounts with few followers)? Because they are pretty easy to bypass by having a bunch of accounts follow each other and create them well ahead of time (and no Twitter can't prevent this: finding cliques in a graph is NP-Complete, and Twitters graph is crazy big). Twitter could add many things, but they haven't even figured out that they need to accounts with female names and portraits and user names that ends in a number, even though they are always spammers.
  - eropple 10y ago
    I think shared blocklists are great. As defaults, probably not. I don't use any shared lists because nobody's going to take a serious run at me, I just don't want to spike my blood pressure seeing the egg/anime smurf accounts well-actually at me. But I think network-effect block lists are probably a good idea. Nobody who follows Sargon of Akkad or other white-supremacist dorks is somebody I am ever going to want to hear from, so tube their tweets. That sort of thing.
- intoverflow2 10y ago
  > including "automatically block accounts under X days old that @ me" How can a new user (who isn't a harasser) engage with the Twitter service if they get auto-blocked when they try to engage with anyone on the platform?
  - eropple 10y ago
    Personally? I interact with people I know, not #brands. And I do that by following, not by @'ing out of the blue. Everybody I know does the same. If somebody with a name I recognize follows me, I'm gonna follow them back and @'ing is fine.
    - liquidise 10y ago
      What you are describing is a tinder approach to twitter, which serve fundamentally different roles in the online social sphere. I understand that is how you and yours use twitter, but extrapolating that behavior across hundreds of millions of users is almost certainly hasty.
    - intoverflow2 10y ago
      > I interact with people I know I prefer have far less public services for this. Feels like airing dirty laundry to do it on twitter
  - epistasis 10y ago
    > when they try to engage with _anyone_ on the platform But it's not anyone, it's only those that are under assault and have turned on the block. How many people are going to do that? Only the people that need it to continue using Twitter.
  - rhizome 10y ago
    If "engage" means "HA HA U SUK TRUMP UR AZZ MAKE ME A SANDWICH" then maybe Twitter isn't a good place for them.
    - strken 10y ago
- moonshinefe 10y ago
  I believe what he was getting at is as an adult, you should be able to realize that a website on the internet is just that--and have the ability to take it with a grain of salt without being highly offended / outraged. I don't think the intention was to say everyone on Twitter are adults--in fact it's the complete opposite of that. It's a platform where you can get both the best and the worst from all walks of life across the world. Sometimes there will be jerks and people who are the polar opposite ideologically to what you agree with.
  - nikdaheratik 10y ago
    And the point is that disagreement isn't what runs people off that platform. It's abusive behavior by large groups of people (and sometimes their bots) towards whoever they don't like.
FussyZeus 10y ago
Where've you been? Twitter's been trying to become Facebook for years.
tomjen3 10y ago
Please show me an intelligent left-wing and an intelligent-right wing person, both of consistently post well reasoned and well argued content from their perspectives. It doesn't matter what side they are on, all that gets shared on twitter that would qualify as political is absolutely nauseating waving that sides flag and telling the world how stupid the other side is. It would be better if it was blocked, preferably by default.
m-p-3 10y ago
They're Digg-ing themselves.

wildpeaks 10y ago

I hope they took into account that blind users usually also don't upload avatars.

27182818284 10y ago
It isn't just about blocking those that haven't uploaded avatars. Egg users stick out because they have other properties such as New account follows a lot quickly, but doesn't have followers New account that with time never ever tweets, only retweets and follows New account that starts and then immediately follows just a single person ever. All of those are suspicious
- bussierem 10y ago
  >New account follows a lot quickly, but doesn't have followers >New account that with time never ever tweets, only retweets and follows Both of these are also the behavior of people who use Twitter simply as a content stream. They pretty accurately describe how I use Twitter.
  - ceejayoz 10y ago
    Given the penalty is limited reach, sounds like there'd be no effect on your use case.
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    So no one will see the tweets you already aren't tweeting?
raverbashing 10y ago
Some do upload

james_pm 10y ago

Next they'll want proof that the person in the avatar is actually you.

vorotato 10y ago
my avatar is a potato, so that would be difficult. Do I just show a potato?
- notadoc 10y ago
  Maybe you'll have to show Twitter your state ID with the official potato picture identifying you as a potato.
- rayvd 10y ago
  Depends. Are you a potato?

arprocter 10y ago

Interested to see how penalizing accounts for 'repeatedly tweeting at non-followers' is going to work when most of what I see on the platform is people messaging celebs who don't follow them back

65827 10y ago
This is what I was going to post, seems to be about 90% of the activity on twitter. They seem to only care about the experience from the perspective of the haves, anyone else just isn't part of the conversation.
- jsonne 10y ago
  I think this is a good example of how optimizing for the power user, at a large scale, can actually be detrimental.
  - xadhominemx 10y ago
    How do you know that? The changes have not yet taken effect.
    - Drumlin 10y ago
      One of the main problems with Twitter is people sign up and don't know what to do with it - except message famous people. If Twitter prevents the plebs from shouting at the intelligentsia then it will make the platform even more irrelevant. The last time I used it, it was like talking into a void and that was with hundreds of real followers.
- ceejayoz 10y ago
  Nothing's going to change for these users, though. Their shouting at random celebs will go unseen, as it always has.
Mendenhall 10y ago
Yea thats pretty much all twitter is. I think of all the people tweeting politicians etc.

donatj 10y ago

The keyword filtering strikes me as the most filter bubble inducing thing I've heard in a while.

nmgsd 10y ago

A cool way to circumvent the keyword filtering: www.seecret.io

birdman3131 10y ago

So because I see no reason to upload a photo my 7 year old twitter account is now considered second rate whereas the bot account created last week is not because it was updated to upload a random profile image. Seems a bit like trying to claim they are doing something while nothing important gets done.

tomjen3 10y ago
I hope they are smarter than that. Don't forget the Gell-Man effect amnesia effect.

tomjen3 10y ago

Dammit. I thought I could now remove any tweet that had the word 'trump' in it[^2], which meant I could refollow a bunch of people and make twitter much more useful, but it seems that it only works for notifications in which you are mentioned[1], which means the feature is pretty pointless, at least for most people. [1]:https://support.twitter.com/articles/20175032 https://support.twitter.com/articles/20175032 [^2]: this is a complaint I have with almost any social media, even google plus. I want a persons insight on subject x, I don't want to hear their political ramblings, no matter what side they are on - politics are poison.

ceejayoz 10y ago
A lot of third-party clients implement this properly. Tweetbot's my favorite.

ad-hominem 10y ago

Oh, wired, your insistence that I not use an ad blocker on your site is actually the reason I am never visiting your site again.

kobayashi 10y ago

No mention of how filtering might apply to Twitter's trending algorithms. Since much of the activities of bots are aimed at pushing a narrative to a wider audience (getting it trending), it seems like Twitter is currently neglecting one of the most serious harms that bots pose to the community. I get that Twitter is focusing on harassment in order to make people feel safe when using their platform, but I hope the solution will also effect this other aspect of bot use/account abuse.

rconti 10y ago

Pretty sure my only use case for Twitter is to tweet at non-followers, eg "get customer service".

notadoc 10y ago

There are massive bot farms on Twitter that are obvious to even casual observers and most of them don't have "egg" accounts anymore. Look at the auto-replies to any political tweet, major news story, or from a popular account, all automated garbage that follows the same template. Why Twitter ignores the crap which pollutes their product is amazing to me. Maybe they don't want to touch them because it ups the engagement numbers and inflates active users?

nkrisc 10y ago
Surely they can recognize the downsides of a bubble of inflated engagement metrics waiting to burst? Willful ignorance?
deeth_starr 10y ago
I'd like to see country of origin for tweets/accounts. I know this can be worked around with a vpn, but it's a start.
- tokenizerrr 10y ago
  That would be wherever the cheapest servers can be bought. Or just random open proxies.
Grollicus 10y ago
"500.000 new Members last month!!1" (I just totally made that up) I suspect its the same as facebooks "2 Billion Users" - its just good for PR to have huge numbers. If you look too closely you might even lose Members in a Month, and we all know "growth" is very important..
- teej 10y ago
  Facebook and I believe Twitter report Monthly Active Users. This isn't some smoke and mirrors number. Sure, bots may count in this number, but they aren't referencing total signups when they say "Users" like you imply.

ghettoCoder 10y ago

Faster please. Anything that accelerates Twitter's demise is ok in my books. Bonus points if wounds are self-inflicted. I'm old enough to remember when you only had to deal with the crazies holding signs and hollering if you went to certain parts of town. If you didn't go and/or engage the crazies they didn't really exist. Sort of like if a tree falls but nobody is there... Now everyone thinks their opinion is valuable and spouts nonsense all over Twitter. Time to take away the soapbox.

monksy 10y ago

What I don't understand: Why doesn't twitter take moderation seriously? On reddit it's left up to the moderators of each sub. It does very. But having a very "up to interpretation" but yet not politically biased set of rules and enforcement is great. We don't have a code of conduct or any of the nonsense. Someone violates it and we catch it, they're gone. (Also that's subjective to time based on how many times we caught them as well) End of.

pjc50 10y ago
I'd love them to take moderation seriously, but it couldn't scale and there's no natural "partitions" between communities of interest with different norms, so you can't delegate it to users. They've only just managed to deal with the most high profile example of "brigading".

snissn 10y ago

Just got this today: Good day there! How are you today? I am a girl who just moved to live in this city! I have done a search on Twitter to look for man in our area and yeah I found your Twitter. In case you don't mind we can make friend and chat chit! Do you have snapchat? Please add me on Snapchat nick: [redacted] so we will chat and I can show you my personal photos! I don't like to chitchat here:) It's boring! Lets Snapchat! Sometimes I also use another Snapchat nick: [redacted] on another cellphone, kindly add this nick too if you did not see me online on Snapchat nick: [redacted] :) Hope to chat with you really soon.

cdelsolar 10y ago
I mean maybe she just found you really appealing.
- snissn 10y ago
  Aw shucks, you think? Thanks :)
Sacho 10y ago
That's a lot of tweets(5+). Did you get them all at the same time, or did they have some kind of randomized delay? Also uh...what's the benefit of spamming you out of Twitter and into Snapchat? Do people get $$ for views of their snapchat images, or something?

lutusp 10y ago

Translation: "Wired takes aim at people running ad blockers."

rafaelm 10y ago

I see Twitter is getting harder and harder to use anonymously. As someone living under a totalitarian government that is tightening its grip everyday on free speech and the internet in general, this worries me. Trying to signup and use Twitter using Tor is practically impossible. I understand the spam problem on Twitter is out of control,but I wish there was a way to use it anonymously.