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Comment by viraptor | Hacker News Reader

An alternative take: there's spam that's trivial to spot and spam that's hard to spot. Twitter is ignoring both. I can give you both searches and keywords to post which will return lots of spam ready to block. Not everything of course, but let's not post the "spam is a hard problem" excuse until they nuke every account responding with "metamask" and a link to Google forms.

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You don't nuke the accounts, you make it so no one can see their posts and they don't realize. Make them waste their time instead of creating a new account.

Implementation detail ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ you can handle this in many ways. The point was that Twitter doesn't currently care to use even minimal effort.

We don’t know how much effort they’re putting in.

What’s the false positive rate, and is that why people complain they’re being banned or shadow banned?

(Definitions of shadow ban vary: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2018/Setting-t...)

My thesis is: if they put in minimal effort into automation, then metamask spam would be trivial to block. Since we know of the metamask spam for months (years?), it means there was no effort. I could be wrong, but I'll stick to the most obvious explanation.

Given I had to Google "metamask" to understand your comment, I’m not sure it’s as widespread as I think you think it is.

It's been going on for months - if you're not aware of this it doesn't mean it's not widespread. If you tweet "metamask problem", you'll get a number of bots immediately responding with Google forms links for "metamask support". Yes, it's very widespread and extremely obvious. Both fake support accounts https://twitter.com/metamesksuport/with_replies (I can find at least 10 more "support" accounts from a basic search) and helpful randos https://twitter.com/ij851227/status/1515302472079847425

It's been tweeted by multiple security people at various Twitter engineers already and raised in lots of ways. They know and don't care. Meantime, real people lose their money - otherwise nobody would waste their time to post the scam.

Whoops! As a result of your action, your userbase has now hyperfixated on follower counts as a proxy for status.

You do neither.

You offer users a list of filters they can choose to activate, so they only see content according to the filters they enabled.

There would be filters against spam, filters against opinions other than your own, etc.

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