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I get that Twitter want to be careful and not accidentally penalise legitimate users, but nearly all spammers I get mentioning me fit the following points: -
by corin_ 15y ago
I get that Twitter want to be careful and not accidentally penalise legitimate users, but nearly all spammers I get mentioning me fit the following points:
- 0 followers (ok, sure, if they had to they could start making spambots follow each other to avoid this)
- Account only just created
- Has tweeted the exact same message, with the same link at the end, to 10s or 100s of people, in a very short space of time.
Are there really any non-spam usecases that would fit those points? Can't these accounts just be automatically suspended?
- pavel_lishin 15y agoThe 3rd point might be a legitimate notification service, like ifttt (e.g., I sign up for something that tweets a link to something to me whenever a page with no RSS updates; if a hundred people sign up for the same thing, it would look exactly like your third point.)
- corin_ 15y agoEasy solution - anyone who wants to run a twitter account like that is told that they can only send those notifications to people who follow them.
- semanticist 15y agoThat seems like an edge case - the first time they trigger the auto-suspension, they'd just need to explain their service and get a 'not a spammer' flag added to their account.
- pavel_lishin 15y agoHeh, tell it to this guy: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2777942 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2777942
- gigawatt 15y agoI've noticed Twitter spam bots have started to pull random quotes/text off the internet. Funny to see a tweet of a Machiavelli quote followed by a cheap viagra tweet.
- dangrossman 15y agoI wrote a free Twitter spam filter service, trained on thousands of accounts reported to @spam before the "report spam" button. You'd enter your Twitter username, and asynchronously it'd grab your follower list and score each account for spamminess. Because of Twitter's rate limiting on the API, it could be a while before finishing the work if a lot of people were using the site at once. When done, it'd send you a @tweet with a link to get your results (and, if you want, click another button to block the spammy accounts). Within an hour or two of people starting to use it, Twitter shut down the account. Tweeting the exact same message with a similar link at the end, requested by each and every user it tweeted to, was considered too spammy. That was a year and a half ago. Nobody was reporting that account as spam, so they must have some basic heuristics already.
- pavel_lishin 15y agoQuestion: why would I want a list of which tweets directed at me are spam? The problem I want solved is that I ever see them at all, I don't really care if Jimbo scored a 78%-probability-of-spam for linking DJ Kittens on youtube.
- dangrossman 15y agoIt was a spam filter for your follower list. Some people just don't like having 300 spammers show up when someone clicks "followers" on their profile. Regardless, I wrote this comment to make the point about Twitter already having some automated spam systems, not to entice you to sign up for anything.
- pavel_lishin 15y agoOh, gotcha. I never really understood why having bad followers matter, it's one of the things you truly cannot control. Anyway, it sounds pretty shitty that not only did they (ironically) shut your service down, but wouldn't even explain why they did it. :/