5 ms·

I love it how they have “automated systems that remove spam” that somehow remove innocent accounts like this one but completely fail to remove blatantly obvious

I love it how they have “automated systems that remove spam” that somehow remove innocent accounts like this one but completely fail to remove blatantly obvious spam. I don’t expect the system to be bulletproof and remove advanced spam rings, but when obvious spam is allowed to stay on the platform I’m wondering what the idiots at Twitter are really doing.

pound 8y ago
re: "idiots at Twitter" - It's always nice to encounter someone smart on internet.
- Rjevski 8y ago
  I assume this is sarcasm, so I’d like to point out that I don’t consider myself smarter than anyone else or anything - I say idiots simply because there’s no excuse where blatantly obvious spam (for example the crypto currency scam replies in response to famous accounts like Elon Musk) isn’t deleted automatically.
  - pound 8y ago
    If you know how to reliably solve that easy problem I'm pretty sure they're hiring
    - ksenzee 8y ago
      Solving that particular problem is not hard: trash any reply to a celebrity or viral tweet that includes a link and gets reported x times. There was a good Twitter thread on this recently, pointing out that we look for complicated solutions when simple ones would do. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/987602838594445312.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/987602838594445312.html
      - empath75 8y ago
        If you’re relying on reports that can be gamed.
        Rjevski 8y ago
        > Automated systems can and will be gamed as well. Taking an user’s reputation, account lifetime, reputation of their followers, etc (so for example, a report from a new account has less weight than an established account with a good history) will sort that out. And when everything else fails, a proper appeals system where you talk to humans will solve this problem once and for all. False positives and abuse are bound to happen eventually, but they’re tolerable as long as you have a proper appeals process to deal with them.
      - JoshTriplett 8y ago
        > Solving that particular problem is not hard: trash any reply to a celebrity or viral tweet that includes a link and gets reported x times. That's trivial to abuse, given a group of accounts filing false reports. That's not a hypothetical; as an example, Facebook's reporting functionality has been abused to attack people's accounts as part of various hate campaigns.
    - Rjevski 8y ago
      I’m sure their engineers (if they still have any - I haven’t seen any innovation from Twitter in a long time) are more than capable of fixing this if management lets them. Hiring more engineers isn’t going to solve it. Management and product is where the real problem is IMO.
    - A2017U1 8y ago
      Automatically flag any account making a reply with the same name or same picture. It's incredibly simple yet they don't do it.
- fortythirteen 8y ago
  To be fair, if the only thing they're geniuses as is making a money pit look attractive to investors.
- FRex 8y ago
  I once wanted to have a Twitter account without a phone number attached to it. It got banned within 5 minutes of being created, I didn't use Tor, proxy or anything shady, a normal Chrome browser and a normal gmail account. All I did was Tweet once (their own localized hell world tweet where I didn't even fill in the text). Reason was something that amounted to breaking their ToS via 'automated use' or some shit. Of course if I were to provide my mobile number it'd get instantly unlocked, 0 human oversight on that too. Opening a support ticket sent me their automated crap email saying the same thing and asking for phone number again to instantly get my 10 minutes old account unlocked. I never heard from a human. They reap what they sow. Edit: and by 'without a phone number' I mean I didn't fill it in when creating the account (I don't even remember if it asked there but I somehow got an account open without one), just out of principle of not wanting to give any more information than I need to any service I use. And of course I didn't divulge it after that borderline ransomware situation and my opinion of Twitter has dropped (generously speaking..). It was also my only ever attempt at having a Twitter account, not a secondary account or something like that. I also have a static Polish IP for years now, no other service ever 'caught' me for being a bot, it was in an up to date Chrome on Windows 10, etc.
fortythirteen 8y ago
It all makes sense when you realize that they're lying and their "automated system" is a bunch of low level contractors.
- Rjevski 8y ago
  Most likely, but then I wonder, what do their 1k-5k (according to CrunchBase) employees really do? A simple spam flagging system (that’ll take care of the lowest hanging fruit aka very obvious spam) can be built even by a single engineer.
  - eli 8y ago
    How would that be different from the existing spam flagging system?
    - Rjevski 8y ago
      Well the existing system doesn’t seem to be working right. Blatantly obvious spam is allowed to remain, just see the spam replies to any big account’s tweets or spam on certain popular hashtags.
      - eli 8y ago
        Or the existing system works as designed but your suggestion of a "simple spam flagging system that could be written by one engineer" is not a sufficient solution. (And keep in mind that any anti-spam tools will be definitely abused be trolls and other malicious actors to harass innocent users)
  - modsec 8y ago
    I see comments like this coming up on Hacker News almost every month and I tend to think that people who make these comments are either too young and/or have not worked for a mid-sized to a large company. If you have worked in any company that deals with internet-facing traffic serving the size of audience that Twitter does, it should be obvious that 1k employees is nothing if you want to have all the necessary teams you need to keep the business running, for example, software engineering, software support, hardware engineering, hardware support, network engineering, software engineering, HR, finance, legal, PR, management, IT department, etc. A company of this scale is not just code and raw technical skills. There are many nuances that you need to appreciate before you understand why it involves 1k-5k employees.
modsec 8y ago
> idiots at Twitter A constructive comment would have been to point us at good spam filters that are very good at not allowing obvious spam so that we do not make the same mistake that Twitter did and be labelled as "idiots" by the likes of you on the Internet.
- Rjevski 8y ago
  Any of the open-source email spam filters? Not saying they’re excellent by any means but they’d at least take care of the most obvious spam there is. False positives can be dealt with appeals - allow people to actually appeal the decision and get a human to review it. I’d take the occasional false positive with a proper appeals system any day over the current cesspool that is Twitter.
  - modsec 8y ago
    Like what? SpamAssassin? You would be surprised how much obvious spam gets through it in the face of the kind of spam onslaught that goes on in the real world today. Seriously, this problem is not as easy to solve for machines as you think it is.
    - kaoD 8y ago
      Well, they're Twitter. How does Google filter all my Gmail spam? So far I've had one or two emails go through in all these years and my account is available in several leaks, receiving tens of spam mails a day. And email seems like a harder place to police, being decentralized. These guys control the gateway to the service!
- crankylinuxuser 8y ago
  Or, you can spend human time to review a decision like "Delete account with known good history", rather than the current SV trend of 'automate it, fuck it, who cares? We'll wait until someone complains on HN or Reddit' The first rule is you don't delete user data without consent. The second rule, is you dont delete user data without consent! And yes, I work in the industry. Bad shit happens, and data can be lost. But trusting some automated 'spam detection algo' and making actionable, irrecoverable decisions on fuzzy math is completely idiotic, boneheaded, and fucking stupid! If you're in that product team, you deserve every shred of scorn you're getting.
ropeadopepope 8y ago
> I’m wondering what the idiots at Twitter are really doing. What if they're not idiots? What if that system is working exactly as intended?
- Rjevski 8y ago
  Whoever designed how this system is supposed to work (as in, allow the spam to remain) is still an idiot in my view. Granted, I’m sure they have an agenda to justify this (aka boost user numbers as much as possible, even if all of them are bots) but as a user I don’t care - I see spam on the platform and I call them out for it.
  - ropeadopepope 8y ago
    > Whoever designed how this system is supposed to work (as in, allow the spam to remain) is still an idiot in my view Why? If you don't know what the goal is, how can you judge the results? Just because you don't care for the result doesn't make the person who designed the system an idiot. It makes you an idiot for continuing to use a system you hate.
    - Rjevski 8y ago
      I never said I used the system. I deleted my account in 2013 when they started making the platform worse and worse with every “upgrade”. I loved Twitter and I wish they get their stuff together and make it enjoyable again, but I’m not expecting anything anymore. They’re most likely going to go down the same way Yahoo did.
      - ropeadopepope 8y ago
        > They’re most likely going to go down the same way Yahoo did. Unlikely. Yahoo actually had to make a profit. In 12 years, Twitter has only reported 1 profitable quarter. And yet, somebody (or somebodies) keep forking over billions of dollars to keep twitter up and running. Whatever their goal is, making money isn't it. My guess is their goal is the same as the major media outlets: to control the flow of information. It's a lot easier to do that without scrutiny if the tools appear to kick people off at random. The harder it is to discern a pattern, the less scrutiny they'll face when taking down accounts that say things they don't like. It also provides cover if there's a big stink and they have to reinstate an account.
yosito 8y ago
> I’m wondering what the idiots at Twitter are really doing. Focusing on profit.
- Rjevski 8y ago
  Profit? Which profit? Not to mention, having spam on the platform isn’t really a good strategy for profit anyway.
nothis 8y ago
The curves of false-acceptance vs false-rejection rates usually overlap, even in their optimum. I do not envy a billion-user-level website like Twitter having to deal with this. Automation is probably still better than trying to do this manually and failing even more? Who knows, though.
komali2 8y ago
Hold on, I've reported multiple extraordinarily obvious spam rings before, with accounts as old as 2013, and I've even kicked up a stink here when Twitter employees show up, and I was told "bots don't violate the TOS." I just checked, it's still there https://mobile.twitter.com/ksfAKBARI https://mobile.twitter.com/ksfAKBARI check followers/following for a massive ring of obvious spam.
- Rjevski 8y ago
  Could everyone who has a Twitter account report some of those? Just to see if a pile of reports from mostly influential accounts (we’re on HN after all) would have any effect. Here’s a screenshot of the account just in case this actually works: https://i.imgur.com/xNviClq.png https://i.imgur.com/xNviClq.png
- joncrane 8y ago
  I read a few of the tweets and it's all gibberish. What is the purpose of such a bot? Is the purpose being accomplished?
  - Rjevski 8y ago
    To inflate some other account's (either spam bot, or someone who buys fake followers) followers and make them look legitimate. However this particular account is a spam bot as it occasionally tweets financial frauds such as "yes loans any good (link: yes-loans-any-good.txtloanltd.com) yes-loans-any-good.txtloanltd.com #no fax online loans".
- dawnerd 8y ago
  It took a lot of effort to get twitter to do something about the crypto spam accounts targeting elon musk. SO obvious yet none of their systems seemed to catch it.
  - komali2 8y ago
    They're doing something about it? I saw some yesterday.
jimnotgym 8y ago
Is spam a problem for Twitter users? It is bots and the algorithmic timeline (which Twitter spam with lots of people i don't follow) that ruined it for me. The bot issue seems simpler to solve than spam, (a Turing test?) and I can only think that Twitter feel the bots will one day make them profitable.

pound 8y ago

re: "idiots at Twitter" - It's always nice to encounter someone smart on internet.

Rjevski 8y ago
I assume this is sarcasm, so I’d like to point out that I don’t consider myself smarter than anyone else or anything - I say idiots simply because there’s no excuse where blatantly obvious spam (for example the crypto currency scam replies in response to famous accounts like Elon Musk) isn’t deleted automatically.
- pound 8y ago
  If you know how to reliably solve that easy problem I'm pretty sure they're hiring
  - ksenzee 8y ago
    Solving that particular problem is not hard: trash any reply to a celebrity or viral tweet that includes a link and gets reported x times. There was a good Twitter thread on this recently, pointing out that we look for complicated solutions when simple ones would do. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/987602838594445312.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/987602838594445312.html
    - empath75 8y ago
      If you’re relying on reports that can be gamed.
      - Rjevski 8y ago
        > Automated systems can and will be gamed as well. Taking an user’s reputation, account lifetime, reputation of their followers, etc (so for example, a report from a new account has less weight than an established account with a good history) will sort that out. And when everything else fails, a proper appeals system where you talk to humans will solve this problem once and for all. False positives and abuse are bound to happen eventually, but they’re tolerable as long as you have a proper appeals process to deal with them.
    - JoshTriplett 8y ago
      > Solving that particular problem is not hard: trash any reply to a celebrity or viral tweet that includes a link and gets reported x times. That's trivial to abuse, given a group of accounts filing false reports. That's not a hypothetical; as an example, Facebook's reporting functionality has been abused to attack people's accounts as part of various hate campaigns.
  - Rjevski 8y ago
    I’m sure their engineers (if they still have any - I haven’t seen any innovation from Twitter in a long time) are more than capable of fixing this if management lets them. Hiring more engineers isn’t going to solve it. Management and product is where the real problem is IMO.
  - A2017U1 8y ago
    Automatically flag any account making a reply with the same name or same picture. It's incredibly simple yet they don't do it.
fortythirteen 8y ago
To be fair, if the only thing they're geniuses as is making a money pit look attractive to investors.
FRex 8y ago
I once wanted to have a Twitter account without a phone number attached to it. It got banned within 5 minutes of being created, I didn't use Tor, proxy or anything shady, a normal Chrome browser and a normal gmail account. All I did was Tweet once (their own localized hell world tweet where I didn't even fill in the text). Reason was something that amounted to breaking their ToS via 'automated use' or some shit. Of course if I were to provide my mobile number it'd get instantly unlocked, 0 human oversight on that too. Opening a support ticket sent me their automated crap email saying the same thing and asking for phone number again to instantly get my 10 minutes old account unlocked. I never heard from a human. They reap what they sow. Edit: and by 'without a phone number' I mean I didn't fill it in when creating the account (I don't even remember if it asked there but I somehow got an account open without one), just out of principle of not wanting to give any more information than I need to any service I use. And of course I didn't divulge it after that borderline ransomware situation and my opinion of Twitter has dropped (generously speaking..). It was also my only ever attempt at having a Twitter account, not a secondary account or something like that. I also have a static Polish IP for years now, no other service ever 'caught' me for being a bot, it was in an up to date Chrome on Windows 10, etc.

fortythirteen 8y ago

It all makes sense when you realize that they're lying and their "automated system" is a bunch of low level contractors.

Rjevski 8y ago
Most likely, but then I wonder, what do their 1k-5k (according to CrunchBase) employees really do? A simple spam flagging system (that’ll take care of the lowest hanging fruit aka very obvious spam) can be built even by a single engineer.
- eli 8y ago
  How would that be different from the existing spam flagging system?
  - Rjevski 8y ago
    Well the existing system doesn’t seem to be working right. Blatantly obvious spam is allowed to remain, just see the spam replies to any big account’s tweets or spam on certain popular hashtags.
    - eli 8y ago
      Or the existing system works as designed but your suggestion of a "simple spam flagging system that could be written by one engineer" is not a sufficient solution. (And keep in mind that any anti-spam tools will be definitely abused be trolls and other malicious actors to harass innocent users)
- modsec 8y ago
  I see comments like this coming up on Hacker News almost every month and I tend to think that people who make these comments are either too young and/or have not worked for a mid-sized to a large company. If you have worked in any company that deals with internet-facing traffic serving the size of audience that Twitter does, it should be obvious that 1k employees is nothing if you want to have all the necessary teams you need to keep the business running, for example, software engineering, software support, hardware engineering, hardware support, network engineering, software engineering, HR, finance, legal, PR, management, IT department, etc. A company of this scale is not just code and raw technical skills. There are many nuances that you need to appreciate before you understand why it involves 1k-5k employees.

modsec 8y ago

> idiots at Twitter A constructive comment would have been to point us at good spam filters that are very good at not allowing obvious spam so that we do not make the same mistake that Twitter did and be labelled as "idiots" by the likes of you on the Internet.

Rjevski 8y ago
Any of the open-source email spam filters? Not saying they’re excellent by any means but they’d at least take care of the most obvious spam there is. False positives can be dealt with appeals - allow people to actually appeal the decision and get a human to review it. I’d take the occasional false positive with a proper appeals system any day over the current cesspool that is Twitter.
- modsec 8y ago
  Like what? SpamAssassin? You would be surprised how much obvious spam gets through it in the face of the kind of spam onslaught that goes on in the real world today. Seriously, this problem is not as easy to solve for machines as you think it is.
  - kaoD 8y ago
    Well, they're Twitter. How does Google filter all my Gmail spam? So far I've had one or two emails go through in all these years and my account is available in several leaks, receiving tens of spam mails a day. And email seems like a harder place to police, being decentralized. These guys control the gateway to the service!
crankylinuxuser 8y ago
Or, you can spend human time to review a decision like "Delete account with known good history", rather than the current SV trend of 'automate it, fuck it, who cares? We'll wait until someone complains on HN or Reddit' The first rule is you don't delete user data without consent. The second rule, is you dont delete user data without consent! And yes, I work in the industry. Bad shit happens, and data can be lost. But trusting some automated 'spam detection algo' and making actionable, irrecoverable decisions on fuzzy math is completely idiotic, boneheaded, and fucking stupid! If you're in that product team, you deserve every shred of scorn you're getting.

ropeadopepope 8y ago

> I’m wondering what the idiots at Twitter are really doing. What if they're not idiots? What if that system is working exactly as intended?

Rjevski 8y ago
Whoever designed how this system is supposed to work (as in, allow the spam to remain) is still an idiot in my view. Granted, I’m sure they have an agenda to justify this (aka boost user numbers as much as possible, even if all of them are bots) but as a user I don’t care - I see spam on the platform and I call them out for it.
- ropeadopepope 8y ago
  > Whoever designed how this system is supposed to work (as in, allow the spam to remain) is still an idiot in my view Why? If you don't know what the goal is, how can you judge the results? Just because you don't care for the result doesn't make the person who designed the system an idiot. It makes you an idiot for continuing to use a system you hate.
  - Rjevski 8y ago
    I never said I used the system. I deleted my account in 2013 when they started making the platform worse and worse with every “upgrade”. I loved Twitter and I wish they get their stuff together and make it enjoyable again, but I’m not expecting anything anymore. They’re most likely going to go down the same way Yahoo did.
    - ropeadopepope 8y ago
      > They’re most likely going to go down the same way Yahoo did. Unlikely. Yahoo actually had to make a profit. In 12 years, Twitter has only reported 1 profitable quarter. And yet, somebody (or somebodies) keep forking over billions of dollars to keep twitter up and running. Whatever their goal is, making money isn't it. My guess is their goal is the same as the major media outlets: to control the flow of information. It's a lot easier to do that without scrutiny if the tools appear to kick people off at random. The harder it is to discern a pattern, the less scrutiny they'll face when taking down accounts that say things they don't like. It also provides cover if there's a big stink and they have to reinstate an account.

yosito 8y ago

> I’m wondering what the idiots at Twitter are really doing. Focusing on profit.

Rjevski 8y ago
Profit? Which profit? Not to mention, having spam on the platform isn’t really a good strategy for profit anyway.

nothis 8y ago

The curves of false-acceptance vs false-rejection rates usually overlap, even in their optimum. I do not envy a billion-user-level website like Twitter having to deal with this. Automation is probably still better than trying to do this manually and failing even more? Who knows, though.

komali2 8y ago

Hold on, I've reported multiple extraordinarily obvious spam rings before, with accounts as old as 2013, and I've even kicked up a stink here when Twitter employees show up, and I was told "bots don't violate the TOS." I just checked, it's still there https://mobile.twitter.com/ksfAKBARI https://mobile.twitter.com/ksfAKBARI check followers/following for a massive ring of obvious spam.

Rjevski 8y ago
Could everyone who has a Twitter account report some of those? Just to see if a pile of reports from mostly influential accounts (we’re on HN after all) would have any effect. Here’s a screenshot of the account just in case this actually works: https://i.imgur.com/xNviClq.png https://i.imgur.com/xNviClq.png
joncrane 8y ago
I read a few of the tweets and it's all gibberish. What is the purpose of such a bot? Is the purpose being accomplished?
- Rjevski 8y ago
  To inflate some other account's (either spam bot, or someone who buys fake followers) followers and make them look legitimate. However this particular account is a spam bot as it occasionally tweets financial frauds such as "yes loans any good (link: yes-loans-any-good.txtloanltd.com) yes-loans-any-good.txtloanltd.com #no fax online loans".
dawnerd 8y ago
It took a lot of effort to get twitter to do something about the crypto spam accounts targeting elon musk. SO obvious yet none of their systems seemed to catch it.
- komali2 8y ago
  They're doing something about it? I saw some yesterday.

jimnotgym 8y ago

Is spam a problem for Twitter users? It is bots and the algorithmic timeline (which Twitter spam with lots of people i don't follow) that ruined it for me. The bot issue seems simpler to solve than spam, (a Turing test?) and I can only think that Twitter feel the bots will one day make them profitable.