The earthquake that killed Twitter? Spam makes the utility useless
seaicethoughts.blogspot.com
seaicethoughts.blogspot.com
The signal-to-noise ratio in Twitter is already low as it is. Most tweets contain links, lots of users are followers but are not followed.
Sure, combining several clever heuristics can reduce spam levels, and no doubt Twitter must attack this aspect if it wants to stay relevant.
But can you put your finger on what exactly constitutes spam in a platform that is so noisy?
Has anyone tried using a Bayesian filter for twitter spam? These have been very successful for email. In fact, I consider email spam a solved problem now (thanks Gmail!)
It's for things like this that I wish I could insert a proxy between my twitter clients and twitter itself and build my own rules/spam filter.
My assertion is that after a certain point (which we are not far from), Twitter as a platform will have a problem making a distinction between "spam" and "legitimate content".
Where you can see the real problem is when there are trending hashtags that spammers get a hold of... spammers grab hold onto a hashtag and keep it artifically trending long past its relevance.
Twitter could easily detect spammers - by their follow history, reputation score (eg a google-rank link like SVD of the follow graph), or simple ratios like follows vs followers. It will inevitably false flag some people but that's not nearly so much of a problem.
That is, they don't have to outright ban these spammers, all they have to do is block these people from search results available for #hashtags or @replies. In the case of genuine people false flagged as spammers, they can still get their message out to genuine followers. It's not too much of a loss to be banned from search results and @reply messaging until you build your karma level a bit.
You're absolutely right twitter should fix this and do it fast. It's a goddamn shame seeing a potentially very useful public resource - like adhoc organising around #hashtags - being destroyed by the actions of a few.
tl;dr Twitter can starve out the spammers just by blocking search results.
It's not an all-or-nothing thing. Excluding suspect accounts from @-replies and hashtag search results is a nice low-key way to keep the majority of conversations going. It's also subtle enough that the spammer might not realise that no one is listening.
--edited to remove quotes around the word rank. Not sure why I put them there.
That said: I agree, banning accounts that tweet nothing but the same link would be a really easy step towards reducing the amount of spam. At the same time - maybe Twitter don't want to auto-ban, as this is a quick and easy way of finding spammers. Tricky :-/
Lots of accounts are set up just to Follow back anyone who Follows them. I've understood for a long time that Follower counts on Twitter are meaningless.
But @-replying or tweeting the same link to different hashtags? Spam, spam, spam!
Sometimes I may still want to allow anonymous (to me) signals to influence what I see, but generally I only want to see content/recommendations that people 2 or 3 degrees of separation from me have given some positive signal for.
Too much of my day is filtering noise.
Our online personas treat us like those stupid parties where you have to wear a "Hello, my name is:" sticker. IMHO, every good service is a fragment of your life, and doesn't try to be the entirety of it. That's how the offline world works, anyway.
Until twitter sorts out this themselves, there is a need for something like a browser add-on that hides the following from hashtag searches: new accounts, Retweets, Accounts with less than 10 followers, Accounts that often tweet trending topics, Tweets with more than one trending hashtag
Then the problem wasn't spam, but #ashtag retweet avalanches from some well-followed celebrities. The most egregious example I remember: this guy Paulo Coelho in Brazil, retweeted through pages and pages of search results (the source: https://twitter.com/#!/paulocoelho/status/12399786645). I'm pretty sure Justin Bieber said something too, so that was it for #ashtag.
This would probably have been easier to deal with than spam, because people weren't actively trying to game them. Twitter just needed to aggregate some information and make it blockable, e.g. "don't show me (re-)tweets with this text anymore". As a sometimes-user, I still don't see a straightforward way to do something like this in the clients I use. So now the spam angle is not a surprise at all.
So I propose the heuristic: new account+trending topic => spam
I wasn't in the very first batch of people using Twitter (sxsw 2006), but I was on there shortly after any now I barely care about it anymore. Its an annoyance. A tool. Worse than email with few real benefits. At this point its just back to texting the 100 or so people who I really want to stay in touch with instead of tweeting at them like I was doing for a few years.
The main issue is that any of these methods will hurt marginal users. If you fall into the false-positive pool, you likely don't use Twitter much, and may drop off entirely if your account gets flagged. Twitter can't afford to lose those users, or it will seriously hinder their reach. How valuable is Twitter is it contains a bunch of super users Tweeting at each other?
(this all beside the point that any of these methods will kill their "Tweets per Day" and "Total Users" metrics)
I think she's right.
For what its worth I set up this site http://chchneeds.org.nz immediately after the last big earthquake.. and it is still operating today. As a first step to finding tweets relevant to chch earthquake and filtering out spam it does also allow for filtering by address when people mention an actual address in the tweet.
For example if they say 'at 23 Maidavale lane' or 'in Sydenham' it tags those tweets as being in a particular suburb and in the region of canterbury. For example: http://chchneeds.org.nz/#!/loc/canterbury
I had grander ideas for this but it was all about people in canterbury choosing to actively use the tags #offer and #need. When I realised that eq.org.nz and their volunteers were doing a better job of filtering and sorting (and getting their message out) than i put my time into helping them.
At this time eq.org.nz has been shut down as it does use quite a lot of volunteer hours to keep going, but everyone and anyone is welcome to try and use the data from chchneeds in anyway that they think it may helps. It's all open data made publically available of course. I'm @chchneeds on twitter if you want to get in touch with me.
Also for what its worth I also set up a similar service for the japanese earthquake, but was overwhelmed by the amount of data, and I wasn't keeping up so I had to shut it down. The new rate limiting rules from twitter don't help much with this.