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Option 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 actuall
by jsnell 5y ago
Option 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 agoHuh? Can you explain this one, please?
- bastawhiz 5y agoYou'll immediately get replies from spam bots
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- cmckn 5y agometamask is a crypto thing, huge amounts of twitter spam are related to crypto nonsense.
- jsheard 5y agoMetamask is a crypto wallet manager, and often people mention it in Tweets because they're having some kind of problem using it, so spambots reply with links to fake "Metamask support" pages that helpfully guide you through the process of handing your private keys over to someone who will immediately steal all your bitcoins and monkey JPEGs. That particular type of spam has been around for a while now so people must still be falling for it.
- userbinator 5y agoThanks for the explanation. As I've stayed far away from cryptocurrencies, I thought it was Covid related at first.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- pmarreck 5y agoSeems like a perfect honeypot candidate
- nickstinemates 5y agoHilarious. This is actually true. https://twitter.com/nickstinemates/status/1487161750944313346 https://twitter.com/nickstinemates/status/148716175094431334...
- jsheard 5y agoInterestingly the spam is usually under the "possibly offensive replies" fold, so Twitter is detecting that somethings up but falls short of blocking the spam altogether.
- duskwuff 5y ago"Metamask" is pretty effective, but it only gets better if you combine it with a bunch of other triggers. I've seen some people deliberately craft tweets to get all of the bots to show up at once, e.g. > metamask trust wallet support seed phrase recovery bitcoin shib ethereum network nft help moon coinbase defi dapp shib dogecoin giveaway retweet elon musk free nfts crypto punks opensea free raffle dao hacked banned from Instagram snapchat facebook i need an artist logo designer
- paulpauper 5y agoit can help your tweet rank higher
- jonas21 5y agoOption E: Nobody can even agree on what Twitter spam is. Is it bots? I follow a few bot accounts and get value out of them. Is it blatantly promotional content? This actually seems to be one of the intended uses of Twitter. Is it low-quality content? I feel like lots of people earnestly tweet out low-quality stuff, and who gets to judge what's low-quality anyway?
- cmckn 5y agotweet> really hard day today, my great aunt died of covid after a long fight reply> I know we all probably must have heard about Bitcoin but don't know how it works, I tried it in a week ago and i made a return of $10500 after a week of trading, connect with my trader at @SpamBtcAccount1234
- xapata 5y agoSounds like the variable is whether one engages with Bitcoin discussion. I don't, and have observed no spam.
- cmckn 5y agoI pulled this reply from the most recent Associated Press tweet. Yeah, I'm sure they've mentioned Bitcoin at some point, but it has nothing to do with my Twitter usage.
- raydev 5y agoI'm curious, what do you expect to find in the replies under massive accounts like Associated Press? I've long since stopped following accounts with more than a couple thousand followers, unless they're super funny or insightful. No raw news. The replies transform from discussions into animated gif spam or actual spam past a certain threshold.
- cmckn 5y agoI mean I guess I expect to find replies from humans? I follow AP because getting raw reporting is valuable. I don’t get a lot of value from the comments section, I just used this as an example because I’ve noticed it.
- ryanSrich 5y agoCrazy how we can have such different experiences. I follow less than 100 accounts and easily 50% of the responses are always spam/scams. It makes Twitter almost unusable for me. The most ironic part is that Twitter will show the spam/scams, but hide other replies, from real people, that Twitter thinks are mean.
- jbkiv 5y agoSame here. Unbearable. Stupid suggestions. It has become close to worse than my old yahoo.com email address that I used for junk requests.
- stevage 5y agoI follow around 1000. I see almost zero spam. This whole thread is pretty confusing to me.
- distalx 5y agoUse words like "password", "hacked" in you tweet and wait for it.
- lkbm 5y agoEvery Elon Musk tweet is (or was a while back) filled with spam replies, but I don't recall seeing much outside of that.
- paulpauper 5y agoa few people hit elon twitter hard with spam, made craploads of $ from it
- hammyhavoc 5y agoCould it be that you are perhaps unaware of what is a cleverly veiled spam reply or a scam reply? Lots look conversational, even genuine. You only have to mention NFTs, even in a negative light, and you generally get drive-by likes from verified NFT-related accounts, and if you check their 'Likes', they've liked dozens more tweets since yours. The idea being to draw attention to itself with a certain demographic. Twitter has its own option to report people for this exact behavior. Likewise, the number of QRTs in replies to things boggles the mind.
- 3pt14159 5y ago(Like always, speaking just for myself here) The spam Twitter lets through is ridiculous. Is it hard to catch all offenders? Yes. Is it obvious Twitter is no where close to that? Also yes. We should have higher standards for our social networks.
- JimDabell 5y agoThere does seem to be an incredible amount of low-hanging fruit they just aren’t catching, including a huge amount of tweets that are identical apart from which account they are coming from. Bot Sentinel [0] can pick these up without any direct access to Twitter’s data, you would think that Twitter would be able to do it with all the extra information they have available to them. [0] https://twitter.com/BotSentinel https://twitter.com/BotSentinel
- stefan_ 5y agoThat's a bold assumption giving Twitters track record of terribleness. I don't understand what the line of thought here is, anyway - do you want to convince people that see tons of spam on Twitter every day that they are imagining things? It's not real? Like, no, I see it every day. Lots of it.
- winternett 5y agoThe experience is based on who you follow. Twitter builds a list of topics based on your activity and it never gets edited, so even if you unfollow someone, that list still influences everything you see. Algorithm development has been poor and really frustrating to users because if they even come across someone who followed the Kardashians (for example), they literally get spammed with that news for the life of their accounts, and Twitter's "mutewords" functionality has also not worked for many years, I can't tell if that is intentionally so or not.
- stevage 5y agoEh? Muting words works just fine ?
- winternett 5y agoOn your account perhaps, because you don't follow the same people I do... Not on my 2, and for many friends I know. Try muting "BTS" The (K-Pop group) as an example.
- rchaud 5y agoI think there's a minimum character count for mute to work. My mute list includes "NFT" and "NFTs" and yet plenty of tweets get through. However, other mute words that are longer and not acronyms, will be filtered out as requested.
- winternett 5y agogenerally that would indicate that the feature needs an update to address the issue... But it's rather convenient for the platform to not do that update if it circumvented their profit making interests, and the interests of the other paying entities (like corps and celebrities) that need to promote things that could be otherwise muted for the comfort of their entire user community. Sure, it's not always a conspiracy theory as someone will likely comment, but in this case, the evidence is clear as daylight.
- pmarreck 5y ago> First, we don't see the spam that was outright blocked, so we have no idea of what the false negative rate is Yep. Perfect example of the Survivorship Fallacy/Bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- gojomo 5y agoTwitter's biggest external spam problems are: • abuse of @-replies • unsolicitied DMs …which both grow with account size (& other forms of prominence, & certain topic-areas), so your anecdotal testimony that it's not in your feed doesn't do much to qualify or refute the magnitudes of others' problems. Twitter's biggest internal spam problems are: • Twitter's ads are repetitive, poorly-targeted crap • Twitter does not provide reliable ways to disable their unwanted inserts – quickly ignoring any number of 'see less often' choices, and doing things like randomly reverting people from their chosen 'latest' to Twitter's algorithmic 'home' feed. As fair definitions of 'spam' or even more generally 'harassment' include "continued unwanted interactions against expressed preferences", this means Twitter Inc is the biggest spammer/harasser on its own platform.
- bhauer 5y ago> Twitter does not provide reliable ways to disable their unwanted inserts Indeed. I'd argue that the "Who to Follow" insert is worse than any spam I have seen or deal with.
- stochaztic 5y agoHere's one way they do it that isn't documented or widely known: an account can get "searchbanned". While your account is searchbanned, your new tweets can't show up in other people's search results unless they follow you. There is no indication when you've been seachbanned or when the ban is lifted, and no documentation on its existence or how to get un-searchbanned. We know because we gather community input on a specific hashtag, and have gotten complaints that specific people's contributions weren't included, because they didn't show up in the search. Interestingly, we had one person's account whose search results still showed searchbanned tweets. They would not show for that person if they logged out. We also could not find out why that person's account in particular could see them.
- robinson-wall 5y agoHey, I work on Twitter's search team. This sounds like a bug we're aware of where an account that goes public -> private we'll reliably purge their tweets from the public index, but if an account goes private -> public sometimes we'll not re-populate the main index correctly. > we had one person's account whose search results still showed searchbanned tweets This part doesn't match what I'm describing, but could be explained by the logged in account having access to private tweets in search results that logged out / other accounts do not.
- stochaztic 5y agoDue to both the second part, and that of the 7 accounts that we know this happened to, they messaged us just hours after tweeting that we weren't picking up their tweets, it doesn't sound like a match. The logged-in account also had no history with the accounts in question; we were actively in a call at the same time trying to figure out why that person could see tweets the others couldn't. I'd be happy to discuss details and specific tweets if you want.
- robinson-wall 5y agoHappy to take a look (next week, realistically, as I'm UK based) - you can dm me twitter.com/nickrw
- fleddr 5y agoWe can judge it just fine as it's plain to see. Take an account that attracts bots, Elon Musk is one of many examples. What do we see... a) Hundreds of replies in the very first few seconds. It's humanly impossible to post this fast. b) Replies share the exact same profile photo, typically of a well known original account. c) User names are all a slight misspelling of a well known original account. d) What they post is repetitive, same spam links and texts. Every single pattern above, as well as combinations of them, are absolutely trivial to detect. But absolutely nothing is done about it.
- imgabe 5y agoThe spam doesn’t show up in your feed, it comes in the replies. If you’re a large account like pg you’re probably getting a ton of spam replies to every tweet.
- Graffur 5y agoThat's like saying a chef put a lot of effort into a meal so you can't say they did a good job
- tptacek 5y agoI get ~2 cryptocurrency spam messages per day. It's not the end of the world, but it's annoying. Twitter could solve my spam problem tomorrow with a setting that says "don't show any posts with links if they're from accounts none of your friends or friends of friends follow".
- smsm42 5y ago> 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. That's wrong. Results can be seen even if the process is not transparent. If every bridge the engineer builds collapses, I can judge him without looking into all the drawings. If every business the entrepreneur runs collapses I can make conclusions from that, even without seeing the books. If there's a lot of garbage on Twitter, I can judge it's doing a bad job even if I don't get to see its algorithms.