Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

It amazes how many blatantly fraudulent spam twitter accounts there are, with links not even masked behind url shorteners. Every single day I get these accounts liking random comments of mine and these are so bad they can be caught by naive bayes filtering. Here's some examples[0] that all have a ".click" domain and their bios are very clearly spammy.

But I think my favorite is that I have messages that Twitter classified as spam, and that I have reported these profiles, but months later they still exist. Profiles that are even clones![1] What's even more funny is that when I originally got the message from this person twitter would suggest similar profiles and I could see 30 others with the exact same profile picture, all created in the same month, all without any activity, and all with the same pattern of name + random number string.

I agree with the article's point, but I just want to point out here that there's even a far lower bar that these platforms are failing to achieve. If I'm reporting 5 people a week and those profiles still exist months later, clearly the platform is doing something wrong.

[0] https://twitter.com/Eleanor1541800, https://twitter.com/Eva626692385410, https://twitter.com/Serenity1260229

[1] https://twitter.com/ReneeYoung71651, https://twitter.com/Jessica77414656, https://twitter.com/Jessica43172228

YouTube had this same issue for years to the point where various creators had scripts they would run constantly to clean the spam out of their video comments using very simple filters. It's amazing the apathy that big tech companies have to this sort of problem.

Wonder why HN doesn't have the same spam problem? Because Dang actually cares about the site's content quality and not about quarterly user growth :)

Yep I've encountered so so many of these too. It's amazing how obvious they are even to the most primitive filter, so I'm just at a complete loss as to why X/Twitter is so disincentivized to fix it ... especially given Elon's spiel about removing bots from the platform.

Yeah I've never had much faith in Elon. Always seems to care more about what is said than what is done. I'm just surprised people still believe him considering he's promised so much and delivered so little. I mean not that he hasn't done stuff, but he promises far more. But I guess he's the richest man alive and I'm not, so what do I know.

Quite a lot of them even have blue ticks, meaning they're paying for the privilege.

It all stems from the "free speech" unwillingness to ban accounts, and gutting the account-banning teams. As well as the very real problem that some of the big grifters that he loves on the platform also love their inflated follower counts.

If you take free speech to its extreme spam filters should be taken down, no?

Ofcourse no actual real life user wants to inundated with spam, scams and advertising.

Let's be clear though, the platform is not a platform of free speech as in 1st Amendment free speech. Actually I'm not sure what definition it falls under because they don't allow threads, they don't allow you to see posts without logging in (though s/twitter.com/nittern.net solves that?!), and it seems to have just become a pay to speak platform (or maybe I'm soft-shadow banned for reporting so many accounts). I'm not sure under what metric this Twitter is better than the one before.

I don't think Elon cares about those profiles. The more activities the better

He paid good money for all those Twitter profiles, only fair to expect him to want to have all of them around.

It’s interesting because he originally said he was buying Twitter because of the bots, and then later tried to nuke the deal claiming the proliferation of bots had created a material change in the business.. either way you’d expect that to be a priority for him to fix.

I think he believed it would be an easy project and a funny meme to own it, and it will soon be repossessed by Morgan Stanley.

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