Hacker News Reader

Comment by DotSauce | Hacker News Reader

Why did you follow that person?

I followed them back after they followed me, so in a way it's my fault... In another it isn't. The whole follow me, and I'll follow you thing is effective from a marketing point of view, which is why the place is filled with useless affiliate spam.

They could stop allowing that sort of behavior, but they know that a large part of their user-base consists of 'self marketers' and other less subtle spam.

Why can't I sort or filter any of my incoming tweets in any meaningful way? I can have favorites. I can make lists. I CAN'T just type in 'Fck', and stop my feed from showing me the tweets with the word 'Fck' in them.

I can search for tweets about 'Ruby On Rails', but I can't just add those people to a list called 'Ruby On Rails' without clicking each one of them... Several times.

To top it off their API is so limited that just retrieving a list of the people I'm following means I get blocked for an hour before I can do anything with it, and bypassing their silly API is against the TOS. So writing my own tool to filter properly is straight out.

I wanted to write a simple naive Bayesian filter app to separate the wheat from the chaff for me, but they make it damned near impossible to do so without being sued.

> I followed them back after they followed me, so in a way it's my fault... In another it isn't

In no way is that not your fault. None whatsoever.

I do agree that a filtering mechanism would be MUCH appreciated, however.

You are a coder, aren't you?

Let me restate it more precisely: The fact that my needs are not being met is their fault. The fact that I have those needs is mine.

My use case, and those of many others, requires the ability to 'follow' others and still filter their 'useful' postings from their 'non-useful' postings. This is 'my fault', in that I require more from the service than they are either willing or able to provide at this time.

Twitter has reduced my ability to use the service, in the way that I would most like to, by limiting their API and preventing screen scrapers from functioning in a legal and non-harmful way. None of this is any way my fault.

I still think my original phrasing was more concise, if not as explicit.

@DotSauce Agreed. I keep my account honed to my actual friends and a few other people. When people add me and are clearly not into tech or anything I tweet about, I block them. So far, I've stayed spam-free.

Do you have to block them, or is just not reciprocating the follow enough? I've been doing the latter and so far have no problems with spam.

I'm not sure if I have to, but I have the impression that these spammers look at other spammers' lists for potential new targets, so keeping myself off those lists is (in my mind) a good move. What's more, it sends a signal to the people at Twitter that this person is no good.

I do think, though, that not reciprocating is probably sufficient. I should've mentioned that I'm also a minimalist and like to keep my lists clean.

Got it thanks. Maybe I'll start blocking obvious spammers too.

You don't need to follow someone to get that stuff.

I have a pretty short twitter name and get @ed with garbage messages by random people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com