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I used to be one of those people who would just ignore Twitter spammers. They would follow me and I wouldn’t follow them. No harm, no foul. But in the past couple of months, two things have happened which have changed my viewpoint on this.
- Twitter Spammers (Huge Numbers of Followers, No Value Added) are increasing daily.
- Twitter has been failing at staying up (witness the birth of a new pop culture reference, the FailWhale) and was just one tick above death during WWDC even though they would probably say that they “survived” it or they “stayed up”. Just barely, I’d say. One tick above a flatline.
If I post an update on Twitter right now, there is a decent chance that I will be followed by one or two Twitter spam accounts directly after that. As is the case with email spam, from the spammer’s side, it is all automated so what do they care? They just turn on the program and it does it all for them. I guess they build traffic from this; I don’t know. Of course if people are duped into following them back, then they then have permission to send you direct messages. Oh boy! Having never followed one of these back, I honestly don’t know if that happens, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
As has been shown by some fascinating articles that have been written recently about Twitter’s scaling issues, part of the problem is the sheer volume of messages that are needing to be delivered by the Twitter application (which was not designed to be a messaging system). As these Twitter spammers follow more and more people every day, they become a larger and larger drain on the system’s resources. As those of us who love Twitter have found out so painfully over the past months, these resources are not INFINITE. No, in fact, they are quite finite.
So, it is with these realizations that I have decided that I must actively block Twitter accounts which are abusing resources. This does my part in “cleaning up the system” and it also serves as a community marker (a la Craigslist) that denotes to Twitter that the account in question is one that should be watched more closely as a potential abuser. It also may give them a clue as to patterns, account names, URLs that are posted, IP addresses, etc., to help thwart abusers of Twitter’s resources (which in the end, affects all of us).
So please do your part. If you think that an account is spamular and is actually subtracting value from the Twitter community, let Twitter know about it. The only mechanism that we have right now to do this is BLOCK, so I’d suggest we start there.
UPDATE: I just spoke with Alex Payne, a developer at Twitter, about this and he said:
We don’t use blocking as a primary signal because it often has to do with personality more than spam or violations of our terms of service. It’s still useful, though.
and
Please submit spammers to support@twitter.com. We have some automated spam detection, but particular examples help us tune that system.
In the comments of this post, StopTwitterSpam suggested that submitting a spammer’s name here as a spam request has also been effective.
13 comments ↓
Couldn’t agree more, Damon. I was just pondering this situation last night as the same thing happened to me. At the time I just ignored her (who are we kidding, it’s a dude for sure) but wondered if I should block her? I’ll block from now on.
Hear, hear! I’ve started doing this as well.
I’d even go so far as to suggest that those with followers over a certain level (1000, say?) should pay for the service. What individual can truly keep up with 1000 people, and have more than that many friends? More than that, and you’re a “public figure” who should pay into the system upkeep. This would prevent the games of certain public figures within the community having “follower contests” from dragging the infrastructure down. And it would force sp@mmers to pay up or lose the benefit of an unlimited number of followers.
But leave the fembots alone! They’re not evil, they’re just programmed that way.
I have over 2,000 followers (and increasing).
I don’t know most of them. I don’t look at who they are. I don’t get notified when somebody follows me.
Why would I pay anything because people chose to follow me?
I think what Smythe meant to say was “Followings” (meaning how many someone chooses to follow). But I don’t agree.
Dan, what do you think of the article?
I’ve been blocking spammers on Twitter as well. I just wish that Twitter would remove the extra confirmation step. I’m pretty sure I meant it when I clicked on block!
I don’t disagree that users might need to pay something for Twitter, particularly heavy users. I guess what I meant was that just because someone follows a lot of people doesn’t mean they are a “Twitter spammer”. But you’re right, they are putting a tax on the system.
I just made a tweet about this yesterday, were I suggested that a Twitter accounts “blocks” should count sginst it (specifically I referenced Utu and calculated “hate”) so I agree, except for maybe the paid threshold.
Charge the API users for tiers of usage rates, and let them pass the cost on to their users.
[…] Damon Clinkscales - FemmeBots and Other Twitter Spammers Must Die This entry was written by admin and posted on July 13, 2008 at 9:41 am and filed under Quote. […]
Great post. Another way that you can report Twitter Spam is going to this Help page http://twitter.com/help/ and submitting a ’spam request’. These have proven to be very effective.
No, I really meant “Followers.” The number doesn’t have to be 1000, but the idea is that at some point, folks should follow you via an RSS feed from your blog, not over a service like Twitter. Beyond that number, and you’ve become, like Dan, a public figure who is using the service differently than what I understand the original design to be. (My understanding is that it was designed to allow friends to keep up with what others were doing so that they could be involved in their lives. I know it’s morphed into a lot more than that, but isn’t that exactly the problem we’re discussing?)
Not that Dan’s a bad guy for having that many followers. Like he said, it’s not his fault he’s popular.
But by being a presenter at various conferences, he has a large community - far beyond those he personally knows or cares about. (Well, no, Dan cares about us all.) Is that something that fits into what Twitter wants to become? (Or, rather, has become.) I have a friend that travels and teaches in similar events as Dan does in the education arena, and he, too, has thousands of followers, but only 30-40 followers. Looking at those podcast professionals out there who have 20,000+ followers and less than 1000 folks they are following, is Twitter really the best solution for what they are trying to do?
By allowing the above scenarios, we make it difficult to police the sp@mmers who are choking the system. (While writing this post, I was followed by @amazon_mp3.com. Is that because I made my first purchase there two weeks ago, or is it just random? Blocked them, either way.)
Thanks for posting this as a forum, Damon. It’s interesting to watch the twitter_verse as it evolves.
Great points! But I think Twitter could easily filter out most of this with very few false positives. I blogged about it here:
http://mikeschinkel.com/blog/twitter-anti-follow-spam/
BTW, I’ve also interacted with Alex from Twitter (related to the API) and dude is awesome; very responsive!
[…] Clinkscales blogged about Twitter Spam last month where he advocated proactively cleansing one follower’s list of "follow […]
Mike,
Thanks for the comment and the post/link.
I agree that Alex is awesome. I’ve worked with him on things before and have been reading the Twitter API mailing list for some time now.
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