Ask HN: Twitter and Spam
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.
32 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 78.4 ms ] threadIm 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 :)
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.
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 :)
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!
danielbmarkham
must be typo somewhere or something?
Name results for: danielbmarkham
Search for a username, first or last name
Did you mean daniel garnham ?
We couldn't find anyone named danielbmarkham.
Maybe it's a database replication issue -- although I've been on for several days now.
When you find that missing point, please let me know ..
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.
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?
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.
Any arbitrary limit is wrong. They should crowdsource the spam problem, not block legitimate users from interacting with each other.
At the same time, deadbeat followers don't really cost YOU anything. Follow and follow-back people that seem interesting or valuable to you.
Or you can directly message @spam
http://twitter.com/spam
You can also block them, but I don't think this achieves much.
Alternatively, just ignore them (my preferred method).
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?)
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...