Comments on: Bad Bots, Bad Bots, Whatcha Gonna Do?

By: Steve

Steve — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 21:40:44 +0000

Twitter always claims that the amount of spam on their network is in the low 3-4% range but then you look at a lot of the tweats and new users and that is not the story that you see.

By: Sherry Gray

Sherry Gray — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 17:35:14 +0000

I tweeted out the word porn. The resulting deluge was not pretty.

By: Chris Reimer

Chris Reimer — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 16:38:16 +0000

I am so glad this is starting to get our attention. Spam is choking Twitter, scaring valuable users away, and is a massive timesuck for me. Twitter management needs to take stock of the situation and realize there’s serious damage being done.

By: Gabriele Maidecchi

Gabriele Maidecchi — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 14:48:30 +0000

In my little, I noticed the problem as well, especially in fake @ mentions for no apparent reasons. The “12345″ kinda users always been there for me, and probably due to my account not being super-popular I have not noticed a particular increase lately.
However I see how this is starting to become a problem, even if I am not really sure how it could be solved in the long-term, even captcha codes are somewhat of a cheap trick, since much of the spam still has some human interaction on the spammer’s side anyway.

By: Jun Baranggan

Jun Baranggan — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 00:35:46 +0000

i have the same observation. i get quite a few in a week. ‘coz i’m not popular. :D

By: Laura Crest

Laura Crest — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 00:05:16 +0000

I am 100% with you on this — I’ve been dogged and spammed from soft-porn to Justin B. addicts. Jill Whalen wondered whether the motive was to crash Twitter not too long ago, with the spamming onslaught of followers that have no business following. The latest I endured was this F4F junk to do with a that annoying Justin kid. And yes, ladies, your cleavage is not, ah, appreciated. And yes, gentlemen, nor is your banana, thank you.

And yes, you’d think there would be a way, an algo, for Twitter to get a handle on this before it really does bring it down. At the very least, Twitter has got a small reputation management problem that should be addressed before it implodes.

Thanks, Lisa, for bringing this up — it must be obvious that you are not alone!

By: Nick

Nick — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 21:38:04 +0000

Nobody likes spam. Twitter has made people dependent on its capability and has done nothing to protect their users’ online citizenship. Rectify rather than apologise.

By: Ivan Walsh

Ivan Walsh — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 12:29:04 +0000

I’d pay for a premium service.

By: rick

rick — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 19:43:08 +0000

I’m not sure this is that hard, but the straightforward solutions might annoy people too. It strikes me that 2 things would minimize this. First, eliminate mass following. Allow the first batch of followers to be, say, 100 or so and subsequent follows are limited to something like 50/day. Second, let people like Lisa who get enough of these to matter to turn on a “confirm followers” feature. She’d stil get the emails, but the bots would not auto-follow… so they’d get no benefit. Leave the default as it is, but give people who get lots of bots a way for them not to pollute the followee’s stream.

By: Lisa Barone

Lisa Barone — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 19:39:29 +0000

Hmm, well….this is awkward, isn’t it?

;)