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To play devil's advocate briefly, assume that Twitter decided to delete all accounts it flagged as spam/bot accounts tomorrow. What would the long term fallout
by dbt00 9y ago
To play devil's advocate briefly, assume that Twitter decided to delete all accounts it flagged as spam/bot accounts tomorrow. What would the long term fallout be? It's unlikely that people selling follower counts would simply go away, just become a more active adversary. By putting bots simply behind a quality filter (a pseudo shadow-ban), they avoid an escalating arms race in bot account creation.
The real fix here is to stop showing follower counts completely, since they're trash.
- pietroglyph 9y agoThis really just seems like a poorly implemented shadow-ban system (although intentional user count inflation wouldn't surprise me either.)
- leereeves 9y agoExcept follower counts motivate active users to stay on Twitter. For some people, Twitter is a social game and follower counts are the score.
- HenryBemis 9y agoPlus advertisers need some tangible metrics in order to distribute their ads (and the $ that comes with it). If followers would cease to exist, half of the emptiness/vanity accounts would also cease to exist (and that is not a bad thing imho).