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Twitter doesn't care about spam?
- ALittleLight 5y agoTwitter is also incredibly bad at identifying offensive Tweets - https://inteoryx.com/htmls/TwitterOffensive.html https://inteoryx.com/htmls/TwitterOffensive.html
- pmarreck 5y agoWhat is universally or objectively "offensive"? Is a young attractive woman who is only following me to try to get me to follow her OnlyFans, "offensive"? Is a die-hard materialist atheist, or a strident born-again Christian "protected by the vaccine of God", "offensive"? Is plain nudity "offensive"? Violent photos or movies? Vanilla sex? Hardcore sex? BDSM sex? Bad words? (Bad word filters are easily defeated with creative misspellings or Unicode.) Is being mean "offensive"? How would you detect that well? The more intelligent the meanness, the harder it would probably be to detect... Are certain thoughts or concepts offensive? Are they ALWAYS offensive (across both time and location on the Earth), or only for the time being, or only for a place? Is the word "Jews" offensive? Always, or depending on context or who is saying it? Is it possible to be satirically offensive in a way that an algorithm would have difficulty detecting? What if I quoted something offensive to argue against it? (I literally got a tempban for this once.) Perhaps they are "incredibly bad" at it because it is an algorithmically impossible problem that is deeply tied into the subjective sensibilities and tastes of a perceiving consciousness at one point in time (or set of consciousnesses, all of which perhaps only accidentally happen to coincide)
- wizzwizz4 5y agoBut it could at least be self-consistent. Sometimes identical tweets by different users are given different verdicts. Twitter's offensiveness detection seems about as good as Google's search results. I've just realised a potential reason for this: we're seeing a spam-detection algorithm several years down the line from when Twitter started. That's several years of cat-and-mouse, where the spammers have access to much higher quality data than Twitter does. If their algorithm was simple, predictable or accurate, the spammers could just work around it. It's plausible that Twitter has run the numbers and determined that this is the best they can do, at the moment.
- pmarreck 5y ago> But it could at least be self-consistent. Sometimes identical tweets by different users are given different verdicts. Anything deterministic could be defeated in short order. But yeah, I get that criticism. > Twitter's offensiveness detection seems about as good as Google's search results. My Google search results are excellent. But I also don't block them anywhere in any capacity; you could possibly argue that Google knows me better than any living person, and I am benefiting from that. lol.
- ziml77 5y agoI've seen non-offensive stuff marked as potentially offensive and assumed it was just that the account makes offensive posts often enough that the default assumption is that the tweets are offensive.
- wizzwizz4 5y agoLike this website? Perhaps.
- ALittleLight 5y agoThe page I linked shows examples like two tweets from the same author where tweet A says "Thanks" and B says "Thanks, sista" and B is marked offensive while A is not. You're absolutely right that finding things "offensive" is a complex, ambiguous, and subjective problem. But Twitter isn't even good enough to be failing at that stage. They are basically marking things offensive at random. It's like - if you said quantum physics was challenging because of all the math, difficulty doing practical experiments, and changing understanding of the universe - all that is probably true. But Twitter is down the hall eating paste, not grappling with those lofty problems.
- jonathan-adly 5y agoI wonder if spam bots count in their monetizable daily active users count that Wall street looks for every quarter. Would sure explain a lot.
- leereeves 5y agoDoes Wall Street still care about theoretically monetizable metrics like DAU from Twitter? I would think Wall Street is probably expecting real revenue and profit by now.
- saagarjha 5y agoTwitter tracks “monetizable Daily Active Users”, which are those that they can show ads (or subscribe to Twitter Blue).
- smoldesu 5y agoYeah, I'd imagine the only real thing they care about is clickthrough rate at this point. Betting on DAU/MAU is a suckers game.
- jonathan-adly 5y agoYou would be surprised. I get all kind of "sophisticated" reddit IPO advice, where they are using Twitter DAU as a comparison.
- loceng 5y agoRelevant tweet from Elon Musk yesterday: "Twitter is spending engineering resources on this bs [support for profile photo from NFT] while crypto scammers are throwing a spambot block party in every thread!?" - https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1484456594775678976?cxt=HHwWgIC5gY7a7JkpAAAA https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1484456594775678976?cxt=...
- aeternum 5y agoYes, it's especially apparent when most of the spam is coming from names that are only a few unicode characters away like El0n Musk. Ridiculous that twitter can't flag that kind of thing.
- stefan_ 5y agoThe best part about this is that the people above telling us they haven't seen spam on Twitter in years just need to click this tweet and scroll a bit.
- lkbm 5y agoI did, saw no spam. Clicked "More Replies" three or four times. Still none unless you count https://twitter.com/saylor/status/1484546928704696321 https://twitter.com/saylor/status/1484546928704696321 Can you link a few? Maybe we have algorithm sort set differently? Are you showing "Newest First" or whatever it's called?
- deckard1 5y ago
- coolso 5y agoWe know, otherwise about 3/4 of all tweets ever made on the platform wouldn't exist.
- chrischattin 5y agoOf course they don't care about spam. It pumps their engagement numbers up. They have a direct financial incentive to let it continue.
- slimsag 5y ago..I think they intend to "fix it" by making people's interactions on Twitter more narrow. They don't truly like the fact that Twitter is a bunch of popular people shouting into the void, they want to bring Twitter 'closer' to something like Facebook (but not exactly) where you are interacting with a closed loop of friends in order to engage more every-day (read: less popular) people. Anyone who has created an account on Twitter in recent years knows that new accounts are indiscriminately opted into new mandatory 'intelligent' social features like the purple star recommendations[0], while anyone with an old account will never see such a thing. They're keeping their old user base, doing nothing to improve spam for them, while driving new users to a more closed-loop friend system where spam doesn't matter. [0] https://twitter.com/mattthr/status/1009095580109426688?lang=en https://twitter.com/mattthr/status/1009095580109426688?lang=...
- tekacs 5y ago> Anyone who has created an account on Twitter in recent years knows that new accounts are indiscriminately opted into new mandatory 'intelligent' social features like the purple star recommendations[0], while anyone with an old account will never see such a thing. Hmm I have an old account (Sep 2007) that sees purple star recommendations…
- jsnell 5y agoOption d: nobody outside of the Twitter TnS teams (including Paul Graham) has any idea of what Twitter is detecting as spam and what not, and thus can't actually judge how good a job is being done. First, we don't see the spam that was outright blocked, so we have no idea of what the false negative rate is. Second, I bet that this is not a binary block/allow decision, but there are all kinds of ways of reducing the engagement that probable spam gets without outright blocking. The latter is operationally preferable since it reduces the cost of false positives and since it makes the iteration loop for the spammers a lot slower. (But also, I can't remember when I last saw spam in my Twitter feed.)
- MattGaiser 5y agoI see lots of spammy content from startup founders, but there is clearly (or maybe bots are better than I think) a human behind it as it appropriately replies to stuff and appropriately piggy backs off trends. I’ve known a few startups that built their initial user bases utterly deluging Reddit and Twitter in manual spam.
- jonathan-adly 5y agoJust tweet metamask lol - its the magic word. Edit: WARNING this will immediately fill your feed with spam. Don't click anything that you get.
- paulpauper 5y agothey are probably not making any $ with this or else you would see the same sophistication that goes into this spam as you see with YouTube crypto spam. These guys are not on their A game here.
- mdoms 5y agoCan you tell us more about this YouTube crypto spam? How does it work? What makes it so effective?
- metadat 5y ago
- hamiltonians 5y agoIt is even worse on youtube Crypto giveaway livestream scammers stand to make from $300 million to -$1 billion/year https://scaminvestigations.substack.com/p/youtube-crypto-giveaway-scams-stand https://scaminvestigations.substack.com/p/youtube-crypto-giv... https://twitter.com/saylor/status/1487141374386450440 https://twitter.com/saylor/status/1487141374386450440 The spam and scams are so persistent because they make so much money, the scammers invest considerable time evading the algos, staying one step ahead.
- kdiwoqlgkf 5y ago
- hamiltonians 5y agoall over the place on twitter https://twitter.com/EGYPTAIR/status/1487141414442053633 https://twitter.com/EGYPTAIR/status/1487141414442053633 tons of these hacked accounts. They are gusseting thousands of passwords on thousands of accounts and cracking into some of them. So they may harvest 10,000 twitter usernames and then guess the same password on all of them , repeat this for 10,000 most common passwords. Eventually you will get some matches. Rate limiting and other simple measures would fix this.
- marban 5y agoWhat if Twitter actually does care about spam and what we see is just the tip of the iceberg that makes it through the filters or is just semi-spam?
- asojfdowgh 5y agoin the thread, someone links PG's filtering method, which claims 99.5% effectiveness? that would still be getting me 20+ spam emails a day at that rate further, if you are trying to block, lets say, crypto scams, on a platform which allows strong positive discussion about crypto, which allows people to talk about stuff they are selling for crypto, etc etc etc, you easily start losing points to differentiate the defender needs to classify every message on the site, in a way that allows detecting spam well after classification, while maintaining over a 99.8% rate these days, while aiming for a 0% false positive rate the attacker just needs to type random messages at their keyboard and use reused passwords / buy client id/secrets from shitty devs, to get access to verified accounts
- pchristensen 5y agoThis is a good place to start - http://paulgraham.com/spam.html http://paulgraham.com/spam.html
- riffic 5y agoTwitter's a company with such a strange relationship with the users of its own site. I modded /r/Twitter on reddit for a year but burned myself out (I chose to de-moderate FYI) simply because Twitter doesn't care about its community or even recognizing the existence of the community that developed around trying to provide the support the company won't provide on its own. Perhaps my take is cynical, but I really do like the concepts of a social media service like Twitter. The execution of it, however? Perhaps this is an outsider's perspective but it seems people who work for Twitter would rather pat themselves on the back rather than make improvements. My complaint of the week - you can't say the words "hacked" and "account" without having scambots asking you to get in touch with "their friend" who will help you restore access to your account. or something. It's just a fucking scam. Also, just look at threads in reddit flagged with the Bug Report, Complaints, or even Question flair. The users are just bewildered and the experience is 100% user-hostile: https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitter/search?q=flair%3ABug%2BReport&restrict_sr=on&sort=new&t=all https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitter/search?q=flair%3ABug%2BRepo... https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitter/search?q=flair%3ACOMPLAINTS&restrict_sr=on&sort=new&t=all https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitter/search?q=flair%3ACOMPLAINTS... https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitter/search?q=flair%3AQuestion&restrict_sr=on&sort=new&t=all https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitter/search?q=flair%3AQuestion&r...
- holler 5y ago> Twitter doesn't care about its community or even recognizing the existence of the community that developed around trying to provide the support the company won't provide on its own. It's fascinating that such a community would even need to develop, but maybe it's because of the difference in mediums? I'm working on an alternative and would love to chat if there's a way to connect!
- riffic 5y ago> a way to connect same username on Twitter, Reddit, and @gmail I'm not sure if any of my insights are to be valued though. I'm just a cynical troll who thinks everything is terrible here. I'd suggest seeking out advice from people who aren't extremely online.
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- iqanq 5y ago
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- tomcatfish 5y agoThey made a fair point. While it might sound nitpicky to you, they were trying to fine-tune one of the points because getting an accurate summary of the issue is how you start on finding the solution.
- NelsonMinar 5y agoThe new flood of cryptocurrency and NFT scams has really made my Twitter spam problem worse. Meanwhile Twitter is endorsing NFTs with UI features.
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- dgellow 5y agoYou can block words, such as NFT or crypto, by going to your user settings. I would recommend everybody to use this feature a lot to avoid stress and content that makes the angry, it’s quite helpful.
- NelsonMinar 5y agoI like Twitter blocks! But you can't use a simple keyword block filter to block aggressive spammers who are careful to not use the obvious keywords. Also I'm actively engaged in discussion on Twitter about NFTs and Blockchains, so blocking those keywords does not work for me.
- RichardHeart 5y agoI spend a very large amount of my day manually deleting spam. It makes me sad.
- ceedan 5y agoInstagram is also terrible with spam. I often see spam comments that are voted up by dozens/hundreds of spam accounts.
- kevinventullo 5y agoIt’s funny, I see that too but they’re never actually the highest ranked comment in the feed order. Rather, they’re always like 40 comments deep in the comment feed surrounded by 1-2 like comments. So IG must strongly suspect they’re spam, but don’t block outright due to the risk of fallout from false positives.
- wnevets 5y ago> You’re unable to view this Tweet because this account owner limits who can view their Tweets I must've sent spam...
- nostromo 5y agoPG has experience in this space, remember. He played a role in helping detect and prevent spam back in the day. https://www.infoworld.com/article/2674702/techology-business-paul-graham-provides-stunning-answer-to-spam-e-mails.html https://www.infoworld.com/article/2674702/techology-business...
- khalilravanna 5y agoBut surely that experience being 20 years ago makes it, at best, academic? Should we act like a 20 year old experience makes someone an expert or just another person with an opinion on the internet? I cynically wonder how much credibility we give this tweet is due to the author having 1) a huge following and 2) lots and lots of money. And of course 3) it being posted on the forum for the company they founded.
- pg_bot 5y agoThis is a pretty insulting opinion to hold. It's not like the spam messages have gotten infinitely more complex over the last 20 years, or that someone who is a competent programmer just completely forgot everything that they know about a subject.
- meowface 5y agoAlso, the spam is so blatant and egregious and repetitive, as pg points out. It doesn't even take an expert to recognize Twitter's doing a strangely awful job at it.
- floodyberry- 5y agoboth opinions can be true. graham is a self important gas bag _and_ twitter doesn't care about spam
- winternett 5y agoTwitter also doesn't care about community and users because all they care about now is year over year profit, which is helped by maintaining the "hopeless poster" situation that exists now. most of the live accounts are probably not logged in, the site is fraught with dead accounts and bots. Trending topics are regularly either bought or spammed to the top. The real-time news factor of Twitter is delayed and corrupted from all of the bot and misinformation activity that is rampant on the platform, and there's really no organic way left to grow an audience left beyond announcing your twitter handle on TV or bootlegging your way up there. It's pretty grim. Even many verified accounts, with hundreds of thousands of followers+, are tweeting automated tweets daily to an audience of bot followers because of the dysfunction, and many people like me loathe logging in because the experience is utterly soul destroying. The ball was totally dropped on one of the Internet's greatest tools.
- fleddr 5y ago100% agree. Twitter seems to have an outsized cultural influence but is dead or dysfunctional in so many ways.
- nitwit005 5y agoI've recently seen complaints that gmail has gotten worse at detecting spam, and I've personally seen YouTube's comments are filling with spam. The spammers have probably just gotten better at it.
- partiallypro 5y agoI've seen some spam on Twitter, but it's is nothing compared to what I see in Instagram comments. Go to any soccer/football post and it is full of bots posing as attractive women.
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- DisjointedHunt 5y agoAnytime I see the comments on posts about social media moderation, I laugh my ass off. People calling it a “hard” problem simply parrot the narrative they see other engineers who have tackled it in leadership positions adopt. The reality is it’s a “Dirty” problem. The equivalent of a sewer cleaner in the old days that is a thankless, low pay, low career prospect, riddled-with-politics , nightmare. Look up the salary bands for roles in spam fighting. The top 5% probably make bank and even that is not wildly large amounts relative to the valley (~$650k TC which is director level) The LARGE pools of spending go toward maintaining an army of contractors that get passed down a barrage of things that some teams flag through automation. Same at twitter as it is as Facebook and Google. You need only hit up LinkedIn for the right search keywords to find the contractor hotspots. The point being, Paul is right. If these platforms wanted to solve the problem, the smartest hires would go there motivated by a culture enabling high impact and good compensation. The hell hole that is moderation operations would make even those guys with the Six-Sigma-black-belt-world-championship-something ops degrees shed tears for how soul destroying the environment is to work in. Source: Have friends in these roles. Seen it play out a bit more than a decade at this stage.
- riffic 5y agoMasnick's Impossibility Theorem is a fun one to quote in these types of threads. Content moderation at scale is impossible to do well. There's never going to be perfection here. It's over. Your points are also 100% valid and on-the-nose. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191111/23032743367/masnicks-impossibility-theorem-content-moderation-scale-is-impossible-to-do-well.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191111/23032743367/masni...
- LeoPanthera 5y agoWhat I don't understand is that Twitter makes it so difficult for new humans to sign up for an account, how are the robots getting around it? I wanted to create a second Twitter account, but almost immediately after signing up it was blocked for "suspicious activity". I hadn't even posted yet. The only way to resolve it was to add a phone number to the account, but I only have one and it was already assigned to my first Twitter account. So I was stuck. How on earth do the spam robots do it? There are so many.
- president 5y agoWhere there is money to be made, there is always a way
- paulpauper 5y agohack into accounts, buy old accounts
- CyberRabbi 5y agoIf you feel the need to complain about the quality of Twitter posts you use Twitter too much. Get a more interesting hobby for your own sake
- DisjointedHunt 5y ago>“If you feel the need to complain about <insert product or service here>” This should never ever translate to “you use it too much”. I mean, speak to the quality of the substance in the argument and not throw out the right to voice an opinion about something that seems broken.
- CyberRabbi 5y agoVoicing an opinion about something broken is good but Twitter is clearly a silly social media site. Did he not get the memo? It’s like criticizing Tik Tok for having too much clickbait.
- DisjointedHunt 5y agoWell, i don't think that's fair. Clickbait isn't against even the terms of service for TikTok and it certainly is not illegal activity. Scams on the other hand are (at least a big subset), commercial, which cause financial damage and most scams are codified to be illegal actions in law.
- CyberRabbi 5y agoI’m not sure if you intentionally tried to move the goal post but spam != scams
- DisjointedHunt 5y agoWhat do you think it means? As someone who's worked with people in spam fighting, i'd like to understand a different perspective if you have one. Low quality clickbait is almost always tied to a commercial end, be it ad click fraud, ad view farming or malware/phishing on the extreme end of the spectrum. Anything policy violating that's considered "Spam" is likely to be tied to illegal activity 9 times out of 10.
- nfriedly 5y agoI mostly treat twitter as a write-only medium: if I want to share something with the world, I might write a tweet about it. There are a few exceptions - e.g. if there's a specific thing I want to know about, like "is service XYZ experiencing an outage?", I might check twitter. And, sure, if someone sends me DM or a link to a tweet, I'll go read it. But that's about it. I used to pay closer attention to the notifications, but then they started filling it with random tweets that I don't care about, so now I mostly ignore that too.
- ghaff 5y agoIf I don't post something. (Or if my company or someone else I know doesn't post something with my handle.) I pretty much get very little in the way of notifications.
- habi 5y agoI have a four letter dormant Twitter account. I get about four mentions/replies per day that link to some nondescript crypto airdrop since several weeks. I manually mark each and every such tweet as spam and block the user, which needs 5 clicks or so. Nothing seems to help.
- riffic 5y ago> four letter dormant Twitter account You know at some point Twitter will just arbitrarily snatch your user name up and assign your account a randomly generated sequence. It's been done before without a given explanation. Just keep that in the back of your mind.
- habi 5y agoHow? I'm still 'using' the account for likes and reading stuff from friends, just don't post anything myself.
- riffic 5y agoThey'll still take the username out from underneath of you if they so choose. It's been done before. one example: https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitter/comments/lbv0eo/twitter_username_was_stolen_given_away/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitter/comments/lbv0eo/twitter_use...
- iqanq 5y ago>I manually mark each and every such tweet as spam and block the user, which needs 5 clicks or so. How much are you getting paid for moderating Twitter?
- habi 5y agoThe obvious answer is obvious, but I kinda hope that this would have trained their model a bit. I do get ‚valuable‘ mentions from time to time, so it’s still worth checking.
- babyshake 5y agoThey need a feature ASAP where if you ask someone to DM you in a thread it only shows it with a warning that you should make sure this is not a fake lookalike account. Huge and growing problem.
- tough 5y agoSince I added my .eth domain to my name 1 week ago, I've got 3 identical looking spam DM's about NFT's or the next Shitcoin... just saying
- bigjimmyjohnson 5y agoI'm pretty sure the main point of Twitter is spam.
- jppope 5y agoThey definitely have a spam problem, but cleaning it up would create a business problem... so they leave the cesspool.
- whit537 5y agoAnecdote: Troy Polamalu's account (840k followers) has been hacked and scamming people for going on two weeks and his media team can't get Twitter to even respond let alone resolve. :( https://www.reddit.com/r/steelers/comments/s6zx3c/polamalus_twitter_hacked/ https://www.reddit.com/r/steelers/comments/s6zx3c/polamalus_... https://www.reddit.com/r/steelers/comments/s67xoi/troy_polamalu_selling_ps5s_thinking_he_might_be/ https://www.reddit.com/r/steelers/comments/s67xoi/troy_polam... https://twitter.com/tpolamalu https://twitter.com/tpolamalu (scammer took it private)
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y agoEvery time Twitter makes a move people either cry censorship or they cry that deleting the spam helps "one side".
- ziml77 5y agoWhen you provide a service to more than a handful of people, there is no winning in any of the decisions you make. There will always be groups of people who will be angry at your actions/inactions.
- paulpauper 5y agoThis is what happens when you outsource moderation to algos and temp workers. Try spamming HN or Reddit with crypto giveaway scams (or any other scam) and see how long you last. (Hint: not long). Algos help , but invariably smart spammers will evade them, hence the needs for humans. Twitter does not lose much business to spam. All they need is to keep most of it under check.
- BLanen 5y agoJack Dorsey is a cypherpunk libertarian, of course Twitter doesn't care.
- nathias 5y agoI followed a lot of academics that turned into spambots around 2020. I'm not sure if they were hacked or just transformed like locust, but they started exclusively spamming covid and anti-trump articles from US media.
- temp8964 5y agoA demonstration of fake accounts on twitter: https://twitter.com/search?q=coinbase%20support&src=typed_query&f=user https://twitter.com/search?q=coinbase%20support&src=typed_qu...
- steelstraw 5y agoWould Twitter be better if they charged a small fee per tweet?
- beebmam 5y agoI personally think spam is speech, and it should be protected speech. I'm not a fan of spam being censored on social media. People should be able to say as much as they want on the internet
- draugadrotten 5y agoSure. Spammers are free to say what they want. However they are not entitled to being part of my twitter feed, my inbox or my network packets. Those are mine to filter as I see fit. That applies to everyone's speech. Your claim that spam is speech is flawed. Free speech is a concept how to protect genuine ideas, not how to enable more advertising. When one talks about "speech" we do not literally refer to the spoken word, nor does "speech" mean any combination of words out there. The term "free speech" is a term for opinions and ideas, plain and simple.
- jzwinck 5y agoSomeone I know well was hired at Twitter more than a decade ago as a senior software engineer. He had experience with natural language processing, and was given a project to identify spam and bot accounts. He worked on this for a while, all the data he needed was made available and he analyzed every account on Twitter. His analysis said one third of all accounts were bots. He presented these results to management, who said the number must not be that high, and discussed what it would mean for their MAUs or whatever metrics if these accounts were removed. None of the identified accounts were deleted. Instead, the project to identify them was canceled, and the engineer quit. More accounts means more money. Follow the money.
- upbeat_general 5y agoI don’t doubt it was the case at one point, but isn’t twitter public now? Wouldn’t twitter prefer ad money over MAU?
- MarkMc 5y agoI'm currently on holiday in Thailand and Twitter has decided to show me ads in Thai (a language I don't speak). I think it's just more exciting for people at Twitter to work on NFTs than to do boring work like spam control or filtering ads by user language.
- Sebguer 5y agoNo tech company needs to care at all about fraud as long as valuations and funding are so closely tied to monthly users, revenue, and other metrics that can be used to launder bad usage as growth.
- Graffur 5y agoAll I see on Twitter is spam. I question their engineering ability
- qqq111 5y agoSeeing how HN handles potential spam and spammers, I can see why he would think that Twitter don't care... I think that Twitter just want to give more freedom to their users. HN doesn't mind false positives.
- Jasonrams 5y ago