Ask HN: Twitter and Spam | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Twitter and Spam

14 pointsDanielBMarkham31 comments

Hi guys,

I finally succumbed to the crowd and joined Twitter this past weekend. (Yay! danielbmarkham)

I still don't understand it, but I figure I need to play around with it some to at least give it a shot.

And almost immediately I'm starting to get followers. Double yay!

But as it turns out, these are like 'fake' followers. They're auto-generated machinations that seem to exist to get me to visit their page so they can sell me stuff.

I feel like that little kid Ralphie in A Christmas Story. The one who saves up coupons and sends off for the special decoding ring only to find out the secret messages from Little Orphan Annie are actually Ovaltine commercials.

Is this Twitter's version of junk mail? If so, what do you twitter people (twits? tweeters?) do about it? Is there some kind of anti-spam strategies you can use? Because if I've only been online a few days and already have 4 B/S followers, this is a mess that is only going to get worse.

Don't pay attention to your followers. Don't reciprocate followers. Follow people who interest you, or who you've exchanged messages with. I've had zero problem with Twitter spam, but then, I just use Twitter. I don't fret about what my follower list looks like.

Even worse are the ones that seem legit for a long time (like a month or more - I suspect regenerating other ppl's tweets, but I've never tested that) and then start to "spam" subtely. Bloody clever and I've clicked links w/o even slightly imagining they were spam.

Im guessing it is down to Twitter being fairly quick to kill spammy spammers.

At the end of the day now my steam moves so fast (with just a few hundred follows) that it's tough to keep up anyway :)

Maybe the answer is just to follow people you know?

But that kind of defeats the point of Twitter, right?

And if you've got so many people in your feed you can't track them anyway, what's the point again?

I'm still missing something here.

For them to show up on your feed, you'd have to follow them. Them following you only does two things, as far as I understand: Add them to the list of those following you and bumps up your followers count.

well I dont use it so hardcore as some do. If your a regular user with lots of follows then one of the desktop clients (I use Thwirl when I feel like it) turns it into something of a public IM application (which is pretty cool).

Personally i just check in a couple of times a day and usually find something interesting. And I post my blog posts and anything I might find interesting on there in case other people are noticing :)

If you have too many people in your feed to track, you need an app that sorts them for you so that you see tweets from the most important/interesting people in your stream first (not necessarily people you know).

I don't know...I manage Twitter accounts for the blogs I update, but I don't use my personal account very much. Even with the business accounts, I'm horrible about checking for @ replies and usually respond several hours later-which kind of defeats the "real-time" purpose of Twitter, does't it?

It seems like you have to be always on to really make it work for you, but there are many hours during the day where I need to be focused on what I'm doing and not on checking Twitter.

But, you have one more new, non-spam follower anyway!

Well, you would if I could find you...Twitter can't find anyone named danielbmarkham.

That's weird, copied directly from the page it's:

danielbmarkham

must be typo somewhere or something?

Too weird...here's what I'm getting:

Name results for: danielbmarkham

Search for a username, first or last name

Did you mean daniel garnham ?

We couldn't find anyone named danielbmarkham.

Using this? http://twitter.com/#search?q=danielbmarkham

Maybe it's a database replication issue -- although I've been on for several days now.

That worked...one more non-spam follower for you!

"what's the point again? I'm still missing something here."

When you find that missing point, please let me know ..

Troll.

I wanted to beta test a cryptography pentesting class in Chicago and figured I'd want to fill 8 seats to make it worthwhile. I twittered "If 8 people tell me they're interested in a free crypto class in Chicago, I'll schedule it". I've now got 40+ people, more than 20% of whom are flying into Chicago for it.

The whole process took me something like 5-10 minutes.

If you have nothing to say and nothing you want to hear about, there is no point to being on Twitter. But spare the rest of us the snark. I did Usenet since 1994, IRC, IM, LinkedIn and we have a fairly solid blog, and none of those media could have done what Twitter just did for us.

I'm the new guy, so I'm going to comment a lot in this thread. Apologies to the rest of HN. I'm genuinely interested at this from both a technology and a startup angle.

Were these folks who were already following you? I mean, they already had to express interest in you and what you're doing, right? It's not like you were approaching complete strangers.

I noticed I tweeted this weekend about how much fun it was to play keyboards at home with MIDI backup. I got a reply from somebody, even though that person was not following me. So is there some kind of broadcast for tweets that people get even if they aren't following? Search? RSS feed or something? How did that guy reply to a tweet if he wasn't following?

Some of them had been following me. Some of them found out because a couple people RT'd the message I sent out. Maybe --- I doubt it --- someone found it on Search.

Recently the spam followers have been increasing at a faster pace. I would say of the last 15 followers that added me at least 10 were spam. I'm also stating to notice more spam when doing a search for a trending topic. Hopefully twitter can get this under control. I'm not sure why they dont have a "spam" or "flag" button on @replies, messages and on the follow pages.

Send: @spam @<Account name of spammer>

Or you can directly message @spam

http://twitter.com/spam

I'm going to town on my list. Thanks.

Normally you have to be followed by someone in order to DM them. Note this is not true with the spam account. There's a special hack in the code to allow for this, so "d spam" away!

Funny - "Hey there, spam is using twitter!"

Well those followers don't generate any traffic, their sole act of spamming is just following you. I'd just ignore it. And I think you just got +1 actual follower.

Well their sole act of spamming might be simply following me, but really it's a neat little trick.

1) Open a new Twitter account 2) Post some innocuous stuff, like poetry, or quotes 3) Post an advertising message 4) Add 10000 followers 5) Each of those goes back to your main page to see who you are and reads the spam message 6) $$$

I can see where this is going to get out of control very, very quickly.

Twitter imposed a 2000 follower limit because of that exact fact. You can never be following more than 2000+(#_of_followers). So maybe you can make $$ and not $$$...

Lots of politicians are active on twitter, just too bad that only 2000 people can follow them.

Any arbitrary limit is wrong. They should crowdsource the spam problem, not block legitimate users from interacting with each other.

You can report them to twitter by way of direct message to http://twitter.com/spam (although none of the spammers I've reported have been removed)

You can also block them, but I don't think this achieves much.

Alternatively, just ignore them (my preferred method).

Keyword spam is another issue. Yesterday i was watching a Microsoft conference on digitalwpc.com and it shows tweets with the #wpc09 keyword. Initially it seemed nice to show tweets on the site, but spam (and sometimes stupid comments) made it annoying after a while.

I'd like to learn more about the relationship between keywords and tweets.

Are there programs that capture tweets in realtime that have certain keywords? Are there correlation tools that map between users and keywords? Can you have something like PageRank, only for tweets (or tweeters?)

You may want to take a look at our app, http://twist.flaptor.com/

It's like Google Trends for Twitter. Instead of queries, we track what people say. You can see how a keyword explodes and becomes a trend in an hour or two.

For example, yesterday someone saw an amber alert. It turns out this person was the mother of @ddlovato, who has 600k followers. You can see the mother's tweet, ddlovato's mention 18 minutes later and a subsequent explosion of retweets until they reached 0.4% of all tweets during the hour (that's probably in the thousands).

http://twist.flaptor.com/trends?gram=child+abducted&span...

I block them, which I believe helps identify them as spammers faster.

At the same time, deadbeat followers don't really cost YOU anything. Follow and follow-back people that seem interesting or valuable to you.

I largely ignore it but you can make your tweets private. That means people have to apply to follow your updates.

Every tweet is junk.

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