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Will Twitter ever handle this? Given how easily this journalist found this pattern I'm pretty sure it would be trivial to start banning these accounts with thei
by zajd 9y ago
Will Twitter ever handle this? Given how easily this journalist found this pattern I'm pretty sure it would be trivial to start banning these accounts with their internal metrics.
- jdanp 9y agoWhy would they want to do that? If they allow this to occur they can post better growth numbers to their shareholders.
- phillipcarter 9y agoBingo. They have the capabilities to clean up their platform. But that would mean huge drops in “engagement” metrics.
- bringtheaction 9y agoBasic capitalistic economic theory says that you must seek to maximize profits long term. If you allow fake accounts to flourish, you tarnish your brand and hurt your platform in the long term. Of course, theory is one thing but the people in charge of making decisions might have no motivation to prioritize the long term viability of the company if they themselves don't really care about the company and the shareholders but just want to extract maximum amounts of value for themselves...
- lbotos 9y agoI can't speak to the past, but going forward, information businesses don't need to last forever, they can be useful in "waves". See Myspace/Groupon. Both have fallen out of "favor" but the brands still have value to "late adopters" or maybe even better "those lost to tech". I think we'll see more info businesses do this wave approach that is not about building the next GE, but really about short term exponential capital growth.
- coliveira 9y agoYes, basic capitalistic economic theory is wrong. Many companies will do whatever it takes to maximize short term profits, as long as they can reasonably get away with that (i.e., not go to jail).
- kawera 9y agoFrom the article: "In an email, Mr. Leal said that buying followers for his business generated more than enough new revenue to pay for the expense. He was not worried about being penalized by Twitter, Mr. Leal said. “Countless public figures, companies, music acts, etc. purchase followers,” he wrote. “If Twitter was to purge everyone who did so there would be hardly any of them on it.”
- TomK32 9y ago> “If Twitter was to purge everyone who did so there would be hardly any of them on it.” Ban a few, even just for a few weeks, and the others will stop. That's how society works most of the time.
- robryan 9y agoGoogle made websites manually go through and disavow low quality inbound links to have ranking penalties removed. Twitter could suspend people and have them disavow followers. People having to clean out hundreds of thousands of fake followers would probably kill the practice pretty quickly.