Option d: nobody outside of the Twitter TnS teams (including Paul Graham) has any idea of what Twitter is detecting as spam and what not, and thus can't actually judge how good a job is being done.<p>First, we don't see the spam that was outright blocked, so we have no idea of what the false negative rate is. Second, I bet that this is not a binary block/allow decision, but there are all kinds of ways of reducing the engagement that probable spam gets without outright blocking. The latter is operationally preferable since it reduces the cost of false positives and since it makes the iteration loop for the spammers a lot slower.<p>(But also, I can't remember when I last saw spam in my Twitter feed.)
Twitter's a company with such a strange relationship with the users of its own site.<p>I modded /r/Twitter on reddit for a year but burned myself out (I chose to de-moderate FYI) simply because Twitter doesn't care about its community or even recognizing the existence of the community that developed around trying to provide the support the company won't provide on its own. Perhaps my take is cynical, but I really do like the concepts of a social media service like Twitter. The execution of it, however?<p>Perhaps this is an outsider's perspective but it seems people who work for Twitter would rather pat themselves on the back rather than make improvements.<p>My complaint of the week - you can't say the words "hacked" and "account" without having scambots asking you to get in touch with "their friend" who will help you restore access to your account. or something. It's just a fucking scam.<p>Also, just look at threads in reddit flagged with the Bug Report, Complaints, or even Question flair. The users are just bewildered and the experience is 100% user-hostile:<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitter/search?q=flair%3ABug%2BReport&restrict_sr=on&sort=new&t=all" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitter/search?q=flair%3ABug%2BRepo...</a><p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitter/search?q=flair%3ACOMPLAINTS&restrict_sr=on&sort=new&t=all" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitter/search?q=flair%3ACOMPLAINTS...</a><p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitter/search?q=flair%3AQuestion&restrict_sr=on&sort=new&t=all" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitter/search?q=flair%3AQuestion&r...</a>
..I think they intend to "fix it" by making people's interactions on Twitter more narrow.<p>They don't truly like the fact that Twitter is a bunch of popular people shouting into the void, they want to bring Twitter 'closer' to something like Facebook (but not exactly) where you are interacting with a closed loop of friends in order to engage more every-day (read: less popular) people.<p>Anyone who has created an account on Twitter in recent years knows that new accounts are <i>indiscriminately</i> opted into new mandatory 'intelligent' social features like the purple star recommendations[0], while anyone with an old account will never see such a thing.<p>They're keeping their old user base, doing nothing to improve spam for them, while driving new users to a more closed-loop friend system where spam doesn't matter.<p>[0] <a href="https://twitter.com/mattthr/status/1009095580109426688?lang=en" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/mattthr/status/1009095580109426688?lang=...</a>
What I don't understand is that Twitter makes it so difficult for new humans to sign up for an account, how are the robots getting around it?<p>I wanted to create a second Twitter account, but almost immediately after signing up it was blocked for "suspicious activity". I hadn't even posted yet. The only way to resolve it was to add a phone number to the account, but I only have one and it was already assigned to my first Twitter account.<p>So I was stuck.<p>How on earth do the spam robots do it? There are so many.
Someone I know well was hired at Twitter more than a decade ago as a senior software engineer. He had experience with natural language processing, and was given a project to identify spam and bot accounts.<p>He worked on this for a while, all the data he needed was made available and he analyzed every account on Twitter. His analysis said one third of all accounts were bots.<p>He presented these results to management, who said the number must not be that high, and discussed what it would mean for their MAUs or whatever metrics if these accounts were removed.<p>None of the identified accounts were deleted. Instead, the project to identify them was canceled, and the engineer quit.<p>More accounts means more money. Follow the money.
It is even worse on youtube<p>Crypto giveaway livestream scammers stand to make from $300 million to -$1 billion/year<p><a href="https://scaminvestigations.substack.com/p/youtube-crypto-giveaway-scams-stand" rel="nofollow">https://scaminvestigations.substack.com/p/youtube-crypto-giv...</a><p><a href="https://twitter.com/saylor/status/1487141374386450440" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/saylor/status/1487141374386450440</a><p>The spam and scams are so persistent because they make so much money, the scammers invest considerable time evading the algos, staying one step ahead.
PG has experience in this space, remember. He played a role in helping detect and prevent spam back in the day.<p><a href="https://www.infoworld.com/article/2674702/techology-business-paul-graham-provides-stunning-answer-to-spam-e-mails.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.infoworld.com/article/2674702/techology-business...</a>
Anytime I see the comments on posts about social media moderation, I laugh my ass off.<p>People calling it a “hard” problem simply parrot the narrative they see other engineers who have tackled it in leadership positions adopt. The reality is it’s a “Dirty” problem. The equivalent of a sewer cleaner in the old days that is a thankless, low pay, low career prospect, riddled-with-politics , nightmare.<p>Look up the salary bands for roles in spam fighting. The top 5% probably make bank and even that is not wildly large amounts relative to the valley (~$650k TC which is director level)<p>The LARGE pools of spending go toward maintaining an army of contractors that get passed down a barrage of things that some teams flag through automation. Same at twitter as it is as Facebook and Google. You need only hit up LinkedIn for the right search keywords to find the contractor hotspots.<p>The point being, Paul is right. If these platforms wanted to solve the problem, the smartest hires would go there motivated by a culture enabling high impact and good compensation.<p>The hell hole that is moderation operations would make even those guys with the Six-Sigma-black-belt-world-championship-something ops degrees shed tears for how soul destroying the environment is to work in.<p>Source: Have friends in these roles. Seen it play out a bit more than a decade at this stage.
Twitter is also incredibly bad at identifying offensive Tweets - <a href="https://inteoryx.com/htmls/TwitterOffensive.html" rel="nofollow">https://inteoryx.com/htmls/TwitterOffensive.html</a>
in the thread, someone links PG's filtering method, which claims 99.5% effectiveness? that would still be getting me 20+ spam emails a day at that rate<p>further, if you are trying to block, lets say, crypto scams, on a platform which allows strong positive discussion about crypto, which allows people to talk about stuff they are selling for crypto, etc etc etc, you easily start losing points to differentiate<p>the defender needs to classify every message on the site, in a way that allows detecting spam well after classification, while maintaining over a 99.8% rate these days, while aiming for a 0% false positive rate<p>the attacker just needs to type random messages at their keyboard and use reused passwords / buy client id/secrets from shitty devs, to get access to verified accounts
I've recently seen complaints that gmail has gotten worse at detecting spam, and I've personally seen YouTube's comments are filling with spam. The spammers have probably just gotten better at it.
No tech company needs to care at all about fraud as long as valuations and funding are so closely tied to monthly users, revenue, and other metrics that can be used to launder bad usage as growth.
I've seen some spam on Twitter, but it's is nothing compared to what I see in Instagram comments. Go to any soccer/football post and it is full of bots posing as attractive women.
This is what happens when you outsource moderation to algos and temp workers. Try spamming HN or Reddit with crypto giveaway scams (or any other scam) and see how long you last. (Hint: not long). Algos help , but invariably smart spammers will evade them, hence the needs for humans. Twitter does not lose much business to spam. All they need is to keep most of it under check.
I have a four letter dormant Twitter account.
I get about four mentions/replies per day that link to some nondescript crypto airdrop since several weeks. I manually mark <i>each and every</i> such tweet as spam and block the user, which needs 5 clicks or so. Nothing seems to help.
I'm currently on holiday in Thailand and Twitter has decided to show me ads in Thai (a language I don't speak).<p>I think it's just more exciting for people at Twitter to work on NFTs than to do boring work like spam control or filtering ads by user language.
I followed a lot of academics that turned into spambots around 2020. I'm not sure if they were hacked or just transformed like locust, but they started exclusively spamming covid and anti-trump articles from US media.
Twitter also doesn't care about community and users because all they care about now is year over year profit, which is helped by maintaining the "hopeless poster" situation that exists now. most of the live accounts are probably not logged in, the site is fraught with dead accounts and bots. Trending topics are regularly either bought or spammed to the top.<p>The real-time news factor of Twitter is delayed and corrupted from all of the bot and misinformation activity that is rampant on the platform, and there's really no organic way left to grow an audience left beyond announcing your twitter handle on TV or bootlegging your way up there.<p>It's pretty grim. Even many verified accounts, with hundreds of thousands of followers+, are tweeting automated tweets daily to an audience of bot followers because of the dysfunction, and many people like me loathe logging in because the experience is utterly soul destroying. The ball was totally dropped on one of the Internet's greatest tools.
all over the place on twitter<p><a href="https://twitter.com/EGYPTAIR/status/1487141414442053633" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/EGYPTAIR/status/1487141414442053633</a><p>tons of these hacked accounts. They are gusseting thousands of passwords on thousands of accounts and cracking into some of them. So they may harvest 10,000 twitter usernames and then guess the same password on all of them , repeat this for 10,000 most common passwords. Eventually you will get some matches. Rate limiting and other simple measures would fix this.
I mostly treat twitter as a write-only medium: if I want to share something with the world, I might write a tweet about it.<p>There are a few exceptions - e.g. if there's a specific thing I want to know about, like "is service XYZ experiencing an outage?", I might check twitter. And, sure, if someone sends me DM or a link to a tweet, I'll go read it. But that's about it.<p>I used to pay closer attention to the notifications, but then they started filling it with random tweets that I don't care about, so now I mostly ignore that too.
A demonstration of fake accounts on twitter: <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=coinbase%20support&src=typed_query&f=user" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/search?q=coinbase%20support&src=typed_qu...</a>
Relevant tweet from Elon Musk yesterday:<p>"Twitter is spending engineering resources on this bs [support for profile photo from NFT] while crypto scammers are throwing a spambot block party in every thread!?"<p>- <a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1484456594775678976?cxt=HHwWgIC5gY7a7JkpAAAA" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1484456594775678976?cxt=...</a>
Anecdote: Troy Polamalu's account (840k followers) has been hacked and scamming people for going on two weeks and his media team can't get Twitter to even respond let alone resolve. :(<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/steelers/comments/s6zx3c/polamalus_twitter_hacked/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/steelers/comments/s6zx3c/polamalus_...</a>
<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/steelers/comments/s67xoi/troy_polamalu_selling_ps5s_thinking_he_might_be/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/steelers/comments/s67xoi/troy_polam...</a>
<a href="https://twitter.com/tpolamalu" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/tpolamalu</a> (scammer took it private)
They need a feature ASAP where if you ask someone to DM you in a thread it only shows it with a warning that you should make sure this is not a fake lookalike account. Huge and growing problem.
Since I added my .eth domain to my name 1 week ago, I've got 3 identical looking spam DM's about NFT's or the next Shitcoin... just saying
Seeing how HN handles potential spam and spammers, I can see why he would think that Twitter don't care... I think that Twitter just want to give more freedom to their users.<p>HN doesn't mind false positives.
I personally think spam is speech, and it should be protected speech. I'm not a fan of spam being censored on social media. People should be able to say as much as they want on the internet