Comment by lapcat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lapcat | Hacker News Reader

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As a longtime Twitter user, I personally feel that the Twitter spam problem is vastly overstated. I'm not talking about the total amount of spam, I'm talking about its effect on individual users.

I occasionally get spam replies, but not very often. I just block the account, problem solved. I don't feel it affects my overall Twitter experience much. In fact, I'm vastly more annoyed by real humans who reply to me with insults. Or real human Twitter "influencers" who start quote tweet memes that everyone obsequiously follows, "spamming" my timeline with the same tweet over and over. In other words, IMO the humans are worse than the bots. ;-)

I'm not Twitter famous. I've got several thousand followers, which is significant but not huge. Maybe if you have millions of followers, bot replies are a much bigger problem for you. But then again, if you have millions of followers, nasty real human replies are also a much bigger problem for you. Fame is a no-win scenario, except just ignoring replies entirely.

If you use the reverse chronological timeline, you only see tweets from the people you intentionally follow. (I wouldn't advise anyone to use the algorithmic timeline, unless you're into masochism.) So I literally never see bot spam in my timeline. Spam isn't really affecting me. OTOH I never tweet about "crypto"...

There is a lot of spam you don't see that affects you: bot rings that push topics in trending and lastest tweets that end up in your time line for example. Or voting bots that reinforce the outrage culture. Scam bots that prey on weak users in popular accounts (read any elo musk tweet responses for a sample). And bot oushing empty publication to hashtags that makes parsing it with a python script terrible.

Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it doesn't make the experience worst.

> bot rings that push topics in trending

I have a browser extension that hides trending topics, so I don't see that at all.

> tweets that end up in your time line for example

I just said that I use the reverse chronological timeline that only shows tweets from my follows.

> Or voting bots that reinforce the outrage culture.

"I'm vastly more annoyed by real humans who reply to me with insults."

> read any elo musk tweet responses for a sample

I've blocked that account.

> And bot oushing empty publication to hashtags

Why would you even read hashtags?

> Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it doesn't make the experience worst.

What I see on Twitter is my experience. It's largely your own choice what you see on Twitter.

So what your saying is that if you use twitter in a certain way, bots won't affect you much.

I agree, and I do the same as you.

But driving in a certain way to avoid pot holes should not be a good reason to avoid fixing the road.

> So what your saying is that if you use twitter in a certain way, bots won't affect you luch.

No, I'm saying that I doubt spam has much of an effect on the experience of most Twitter users. Email spam is probably much worse for most people.

[EDIT:]

1. I never mentioned ad blocking, so I'm not sure why 2 replies mentioned it. I mentioned blocking trends.

2. Even if you have trends, even if you have the algorithmic timeline, I think the replies greatly overestimate the effect of bots and spam on those. You don't see bot spam in the algorithmic timeline either. I also think "outrage culture" is mostly human culture, and we have plenty of genuine outrage even without any bots.

3. Even if you think (which I don't) that bots greatly affect the timeline and the trends, deemphasizing bot-like accounts in the timeline and trends is an alternative to suspending accounts. There's much less harm in algorithm adjustment than there is an account suspension, because false positive suspensions are very harmful to the account holder.

>most Twitter users

One level up you just described things you do (adblock, non-default settings, etc.). You're here chit-chatting on one of the more technical forums out there. I don't think you can, with a straight face, say that your experience is representative of most users.

Ok, that's the HN bubble right there. Trending tweets are seen by millions of users. Lastest timeline is not the default. Ad blockers are used by a minority of people.

As much as I want to agree with you, the default Twitter experience pushes so much pointless spam onto the user that I've given up using it multiple times. I've heard a lot of people cite their own 'systems' which I'm glad to hear work - but by default, Twitter's browsing experience is basically just Facebook with shorter messages.

Believing this is a normal/typical way of using twitter is one of the most neurotic things I’ve read on this forum

I basically stopped tweeting in May. I sent like 2 or 3 this summer. Since then I've started getting a bunch of crypto spam DMs.

Though maybe they're looking for dead accounts to phish and break into?

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