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As a twitter user, it doesn't matter to me. I don't see these bots & fake users. What annoys me with all these platform is that that they choose what to show me. I wish to see all posts/tweets in the exact order it was created. That's it, don't decide who's I should see. Every once in a while, I'm shocked to come across someone I was following and havent' seen their tweet only to check their profile and see they have been tweeting tons! Meanwhile, I see tons of tweets from people I don't follow only because someone I followed retweeted it. What I've done is to unfollow a good amount of folks to reduce the noise.

You can separately unfollow retweets from accounts that do that too much.

You sure can, but you can't turn off seeing what people you follow liked (unless you use something like Tweetdeck or an app that doesn't support this 'feature'). I find that worse than retweets because a lot of people apparently use the 'like' button as a sort of read receipt and 'like' everything that shows up in their feed.

I actually deal with this by marking every "liked" tweet shown to me as "I don't like this Tweet" whenever it happens, and then after each time I tweet at Twitter and TwitterSupport to stop showing it to me ever. Works well for about 3 or 4 months until I get another batch of 10 or so "liked" tweets.

> but you can't turn off seeing what people you follow like

Yes you can, not through an official setting unfortunately. But as TylerH said you just say "I don't like this tweet" on a few of the tweets that you see because "person X liked this", then refrsh your feed and they're all gone.

Maybe after 6 months-ish they come back, but you notice it really fast since suddenly your twitter feed sucks. Just do the "I don't like this tweet" trick again.

The only 'likes' I see now is if multiple people I follow liked a tweet from someone I also follow. Usually those are good quality.

There is actually a foolproof way to shut off Liked tweets (and retweets) forever. You can only do it on desktop - but go to Twitter/Settings/Muted Words. In there, make sure "From people you don't follow" is selected along with "Timeline", then individually add the list of common stopwords to your muted words. I listed the ones I use below, you can add more but I've not seen a retweet or liked tweet since doing this. muted: [a, about, an, and, are, as, at, be, by, for, from, has, he, her, him, his, how, i, in, is, it, its, of, on, one, or, she, that, the, to, was, were, what, where, when, will, with]

Clever! But if you have selected "Timeline", aren't you muting both tweets and retweets with your stop words? Twitter's UI makes the "From people you don't follow" option look like it only applies to "Notifications", not "Timeline".

Alternately, you can control whether you see what individual people you follow are retweeting with "Turn off retweets": https://twitter.com/following

yes it will mute retweets too. the desktop ui allows you to pick only the people that you do not follow - the interface and options are different on mobile, just fyi. they don't make it very clear either way.

>/following yea really wish you could do that with likes too!

This. The number of people I follow are in the low double digits. I follow them because they are industry leaders and it is how I keep up on the latest news and new technology in my field. The new algorithms are showing me tweets from days ago or just skipping tweets completely. There should be an option to see in order or by algorithms.

Exactly this.

My other beef with twitter is a more sophisticated way to filter my timeline. I mean something that would make sense to a programmer, not the typical user friendly useless thing.

yes! I really wish it had this. I have several interests. Sometimes I want to see the news, sometimes read about tech, sometimes medicine, whatever. It all just runs together and makes me less productive instead of more...

List work well fo that purpose. Many clients also allow imeline filtering, or saved searches (with Boolean queries, and including flags like „people I follow“

Yes I haven’t become a bigger Twitter user because it’s a huge time suck to actually get to the few topics/groups I care about. Medium also needs to do similar.

Agreed. Basically, it is akin to having a second fulltime job. Except you don’t get paid anything.

"... I wish to see all posts/tweets in the exact order it was created ..."

Oh my, that definitely should be filed under: "Be Careful What You Wish For"

I suspect such a change as that would end up annoying the living you know what out of most every user on Twitter. They should let YOU configure YOUR OWN account to see everything. But I'd be really hesitant to do that for every account on Twitter by default. That just would not end well.

I'm OK with this being OPT IN, hidden behind three layers of warnings. I just want it to be an option.

It is an option, a terribly obscure one, if you use Twitter's search interface to read your tweets instead of your home timeline.

I have this URL bookmarked as "Twitter classic":

https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=filter%3Afollows%20-fi...

You can make Twitter display all tweets in chronological order, they just call it a "list". Instead of following people, add them to a list. When you view the list you'll see all the tweets from people on that list, in chronological order. And as a bonus, no ads!

> I see tons of tweets from people I don't follow only because someone I followed retweeted it

This is the original, only purpose of retweets, going back to before it was officially supported and was done manually.

Showing tweets which have been liked by accounts you follow is a much worse behavior of the app. I like indiscriminately but tweet and retweet very seldomly. There's no feature to save and show appreciation for a tweet without boosting it to my followers.

Favorites are useful as an "ack bit" too: indicating to someone that you've read their reply to you when you don't have anything else to add to the thread. I am more hesitant to use them that way these days.

It's the way social media is going.

From google news to facebook to twitter to youtube, instead of seeing what you want to see, now you see what they want you to see.

Social media is now parlaying its giant audience into social engineering. Buckle up because it's going to be a rough ride.

They can't control the narrative if they show every tweet.

Since I've thought the same thing 'I've followed these people but never see their tweets'

I googled around as to whether I could change the feed filter/ algorithm

Looks like if you go Settings/ Content Preferences/ there is a box for 'Show Best Tweets First' that you can uncheck,

which looks like it might shut off their recommendation filter, and then you can just get a stream of whatever everyone you follow posts

(or at least that's what I hope it is, I've had it set on that setting for all of 2 minutes, still seeing how it works)

If only there was an open to mass 'unfollow' I could have used it. Instead you have to manually do it individually while confirming 'unfollow'

I hardly use it but i checked my account last evening skimmed through my feed and saw nothing productive. What caught my attention though was a Forbes tweet projecting one of the Kardashians becoming a billionaire because of some cosmetic empire?

I dont even follow anything fashionable except Thomas H. Ptacek and Paul Graham.

I instantly deactivated my account pending deletion. Twitter is as much of a cesspit as Facebook.

I don't see these bots & fake users.

Pop up detail view of a popular tweet from a popular-in-tech person sometime.

You'll probably see, right below it, a reply from an account with identical profile picture and display name to the popular person, but different username, pretending to continue the thread and announcing a cryptocurrency giveaway where you "just" have to send some amount of ETH to their address to "register" or "verify" yourself.

Pretty much any popular Elon Musk tweet will have some kind of "giveaway" impersonation scammer auto-replying, for example. For a while some of the popular cryptocurrency people actually changed their display names to "I'm not giving away ETH", or similar, to try to disrupt the scammers.

> Kudos to twitter

Kudos? I wouldn't hand over a kudos to twitter.

The article triggering this bot ban wave [1] was written by the Times and included behavior analysis that Twitter easily could (and may have) done on its own years ago.

Facebook's actions and marketer value has nothing to do with Twitter's own lack of action to prevent infiltration and manipulation of its platform.

Twitter's action on stopping spam, bots and hate speech at best can be described as slow. I believe Jack Dorsey has repeatedly said the company hasn't / doesn't do enough.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/01/27/technology/so...

He keeps on saying they don't do enough, the times is able to do this despite not even having access to raw internal data

I feel like Twitter as an organization doesn't actually care about the problem, just about their image.

Why else would they talk about the hate speech stuff and continuously elevate groups like The Proud Boys through their verification process (that also affects their suggestion algorithms). And we shouldn't forget that many Gamergate people are still active on Twitter and often use their accounts to direct harassment to people on a regular basis!

The even more cynical view is that there's a group of employees within Twitter actively protecting these kinds of users

Twitter cares about its bottom line.

If otherwise, they'd have suspended Trump's account for ToS violations long ago.

That's the problem with companies once they go public, and I'd argue once they accept any kind of investment; the new owners have the company by the balls and expect Results, expect the stock price to rise. Twitter's artificially maintained that stock price by not banning their users, because it seems user quantity and growth are far more important metrics that influence stock price than the quality of users.

> We used to spend significantly on Facebook for several businesses I'm involved in, but now that most clicks are garbage/fake, we don't.

It seems to me that the rational reason to stop an ad campaign is because it stopped enough making money.

It's not fake clicks that should be stopping you -- it should be a lack of ROI.

I wonder how many people spend huge sums of money on Facebook without tracking their return on investment. I seriously think that is the source of many of these complaints about Facebook's ad program.

I spend a few thousand a month of Facebook. I have no idea if there are fake clicks or not. But, it's not a metric that seems to matter in my business.

While it’s a good point that the “quality” of click should be a proxy (i.e. you care that RoI might be low because of bot visits, not about the bot visits in themselves) rather than an actual measurable, is it not reasonable to assume that if “most clicks are garbage/fake”, they’re not making any money from those and therefore are unlikely to make “enough money”?

I guess that assumes similar cost per click and that your definition of “enough” accounts for a sufficiently low conversion rate.

On the other hand, Facebook (and their shareholders) probably cares that the PPC is depressed by the fraction of non-converting users.

I think you're overstating the frequency of fake friend requests on Facebook. I'm fairly active on there and usually receive less than one per week. (It was worse a couple years ago.)

It may be a 'type' thing. Every time I look at my neglected Facebook account I have anywhere from 6 to maybe 15 friends requests from accounts which have basically no timeline and a "sexy" picture of a 20 something female. If those accounts do have any friends it seems they are all white males over 50 years of age.

I once tried to give Facebook another go and created an account again. It seems like my email was in the meantime leaked to some gambling spam list because 90% of my friend suggestions were fake profiles from around the world created purely to log into a gambling mobile game and (I assume) farm coins/items/etc.

The accounts were obviously fake - they weren’t even trying to hide they were fake, and I actually spent maybe 20 minutes reporting 100 of them, but not only was there an endless supply to replace those I blocked, but the reports didn’t do anything and the accounts were still there.

Instagram has a similar issue as well. It's brain-dead to buy fake followers, have them simulate interaction with your posts to push you higher in the algorithm ranking, and bots are the majority of the user-base from what I can tell. And they have no intention whatsoever of fixing that.

> This is one of those moves that harms them in the eyes of short term investors, but is The Right Thing To Do.

[Cynic's hat on] And they can only do this now, having shown the ability to turn a profit.

Up until now, Twitter has been forced to operate in "growth for its own sake" mode. Investors keep myopically staring at user numbers, confident that there's a way to turn the faucet on, consistently and repeatedly tapping the userbase for pennies per person. The bot accounts don't make them money, so getting rid of them are likely to actually improve the bottom line.

But the sad fact is that until recently Twitter have been financially disincentivised from cracking down on fake accounts.

> Facebook these days, for me, is 90% dealing with fake friend requests from people that are either clones of real profiles, or just complete garbage.

It's possible to block friends requests from anyone except friends of friends.

Have followers on Facebook and filter your friends requests. That is what I do.

My mother and father have each had 'fake' clone profiles of them created a few times.

Occasionally I get friend requests from some random dolled up woman, perhaps once a month.

... that's it.

I wonder what causes one person to get a large number of bogus friend requests and others not. I'm guessing it has to do with who your friends are, and how many?

I'm around 1000 FB friends +/-, but the vast majority of them have been on Facebook for a VERY long time, so perhaps they're less likely to be friend scam accounts?

You may already have a fake friend in your Facebook friend list. I think your account is marked as a target because of it. It's not something most accounts experience.

We’ll see. Twitter has a history of being overinclusive of conservatives in assessing bot accounts. If this purge is just more of the same, they don’t deserve any congratulations.