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I worked at Twitter back in the early days. I left because I had an inkling there were tons of fake accounts and bot accounts. I thought at some point this woul
by someonehere 7y ago
I worked at Twitter back in the early days. I left because I had an inkling there were tons of fake accounts and bot accounts. I thought at some point this would nosedive the company because Facebook’s growth at the time was all about how many active users they had. Twitter seemed to have too many accounts that weren’t justifiably real.
A few years later I Had conversation at another job with coworkers and told them how easy it was to fake followers with $40. Sure enough I found a site that promised a certain amount of followers for $40. I paid the $40 and went from a couple dozen followers to 4,000 over the course of a few days. I think for an extra $60 I could have them retweet something for me as well. At that point I knew my suspicions were correct and knew I made the right choice to leave.
- alecco 7y agoI always wondered why doesn't Twitter do this to purge those bot accounts. They can even do a money-back request to the payment processor afterwards as the service is breaking laws.
- icebraining 7y agoBreaking TOS, not necessarily breaking laws.
- matt4077 7y agoSo you left Twitter 5+ years ago expecting them to soon fail, and you feel vindicated by the very-much-still-existing Twitter of today purging some accounts?
- someonehere 7y agoIn a sense, yes. When I was there the company had a ton of other issues too. Mostly how to monetize the service. They couldn’t figure out how to make money, but they were spending money like they were Facebook. Facebook at least had ad revenue. Twitter really couldn’t figure out how to sell ads. The concern was to me, fake accounts and fake retweets/followers creating fake user growth. That’s purely my perspective and likely not how the company saw it. I wasn’t comfortable investing my time into a place that gave me that feeling.