4 ms·

I noticed the trend of buying followers a while ago and a couple of weeks ago I built http://twitteraudit.com http://twitteraudit.com which simply looks at 5000

I noticed the trend of buying followers a while ago and a couple of weeks ago I built http://twitteraudit.com http://twitteraudit.com which simply looks at 5000 followers and uses a few simple metrics to guess whether a user is real or fake. TwitterAudit gives a single score of the percentage of any user's followers that are real. Most people are above 40%, but some are below 10%, suggesting that they probably bought a lot of them. Check it out! Any feedback would be great.

citricsquid 14y ago
Ah, sweet site. I had started building something similar myself a few weeks back (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4315669 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4315669) I'm using yours now to check a few accounts I know of that buy followers. It would be nice if I could pay to run a few audits at once. Edit: so I played around with it for a bit, a problem it seems to have is it doesn't cope with Twitter "lurkers", people that don't tweet much, follow lots of people and have a few followers. You shouldn't count those that follow ~200 people but don't tweet much as "fake". You should assume that every user with under 1-200 followings is legitimate, because it's not cost effective for the follower sellers to do it with accounts with so few follows. or at the very least have their "score" very low.
- davecap1 14y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. The site is actually quite lenient with the follower type you mention.. but maybe it's not lenient enough! I'll look into it.
  - citricsquid 14y ago
    Here's a few people that it reports that have high amounts of "fake" followers, which I know don't purchase followers: http://twitteraudit.com/notch http://twitteraudit.com/notch http://twitteraudit.com/marc_irl http://twitteraudit.com/marc_irl http://twitteraudit.com/redstonewire http://twitteraudit.com/redstonewire Their followers are a lot of Twitter "lurkers".
    - joshu 14y ago
      I did mine. 25k followers: http://www.twitteraudit.com/joshu http://www.twitteraudit.com/joshu - I definitely don't buy followers, because who cares? There are a LOT of follow robots out there. Fake followers that follow lots of people, hoping to get followed back. If you don't, they unfollow.
rahim 14y ago
Nicely done! Feature request: show a list of the fake followers for one's account.

citricsquid 14y ago

Ah, sweet site. I had started building something similar myself a few weeks back (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4315669 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4315669) I'm using yours now to check a few accounts I know of that buy followers. It would be nice if I could pay to run a few audits at once. Edit: so I played around with it for a bit, a problem it seems to have is it doesn't cope with Twitter "lurkers", people that don't tweet much, follow lots of people and have a few followers. You shouldn't count those that follow ~200 people but don't tweet much as "fake". You should assume that every user with under 1-200 followings is legitimate, because it's not cost effective for the follower sellers to do it with accounts with so few follows. or at the very least have their "score" very low.

davecap1 14y ago
Thanks for the feedback. The site is actually quite lenient with the follower type you mention.. but maybe it's not lenient enough! I'll look into it.
- citricsquid 14y ago
  Here's a few people that it reports that have high amounts of "fake" followers, which I know don't purchase followers: http://twitteraudit.com/notch http://twitteraudit.com/notch http://twitteraudit.com/marc_irl http://twitteraudit.com/marc_irl http://twitteraudit.com/redstonewire http://twitteraudit.com/redstonewire Their followers are a lot of Twitter "lurkers".
  - joshu 14y ago
    I did mine. 25k followers: http://www.twitteraudit.com/joshu http://www.twitteraudit.com/joshu - I definitely don't buy followers, because who cares? There are a LOT of follow robots out there. Fake followers that follow lots of people, hoping to get followed back. If you don't, they unfollow.

rahim 14y ago

Nicely done! Feature request: show a list of the fake followers for one's account.