Russell Beattie's Blog - Latest Comments in Nearly a million users, and no spam or trolls - RussellBeattie.com

Re: Nearly a million users, and no spam or trolls - RussellBeattie.com

rarito — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 19:15:18 -0000

Re: Nearly a million users, and no spam or trolls - RussellBeattie.com

freshyill — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 19:17:22 -0000

No spam? Tell that to my newest follower, powersellingmom.... http://twitter.com/powersel...

This is spam.

Re: Nearly a million users, and no spam or trolls - RussellBeattie.com

Misty Khan — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 14:45:06 -0000

I don't think tracking a certain word and then replying with an @ message makes you a spammer - I've done that as a way to meet people with similar interests and I've offered those people information that they have in most cases thanked me for. I don't think I'd be getting thank yous if those people viewed me as a spammer.

On the reverse, I've received invitations after I mentioned words that were being tracked and if I wasn't interested in participating, I just didn't accept the invitation - not a big deal and I really didn't feel spammed either because I was being invited by someone who at least knew I had some common interest with them.

Re: Nearly a million users, and no spam or trolls - RussellBeattie.com

James — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 20:42:05 -0000

See also: LiveJournal, with friend and friend-of.

Re: Nearly a million users, and no spam or trolls - RussellBeattie.com

goshdarnit — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 09:39:08 -0000

Yeah, there's not much reason to have trolls or spam on Twitter, because it's so useless, it's not worth trolling or spamming. It's the Blinking Bluetooth Headset of the internet (http://www.37signals.com/sv....

Re: Nearly a million users, and no spam or trolls - RussellBeattie.com

Andrew — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 08:33:16 -0000

Reminds me of the Onion article about terrorists shunning airlines because of delays:
http://changingway.org/2008...

Re: Nearly a million users, and no spam or trolls - RussellBeattie.com

Steven Fisher — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 13:30:24 -0000

Unfortunately, the spam options seem to make it very difficult for legitimate new users to be noticed by communities as well. On the other hand, I watched a new user follow tens of thousands and has nearly a thousand following him/her. So abuse of a different kind is certainly possible.

Re: Nearly a million users, and no spam or trolls - RussellBeattie.com

Brad — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 12:39:48 -0000

Actually, you can't add @you messages to your main stream (though I'd love to see that added!). However, you can see all @you's if you click on the "Replies" tab.

Re: Nearly a million users, and no spam or trolls - RussellBeattie.com

andrewdotnich — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 00:46:49 -0000

You can add many @users, yes, but only the first will count as an actual 'reply'.

Re: Nearly a million users, and no spam or trolls - RussellBeattie.com

Mr. Nosuch — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 17:15:06 -0000

While individual users aren't bothered by the follower trolls, collectively we all suffer. Each of those super-trolls who follow thousands of users create a load on Twitter as updates are sent to the trolls, and the trolls pump useless updates in. And one issue we've ALL had with Twitter is performance problems. So while I personally don't get spam tweets, my Twitter experience is degraded.

I wish Twitter had an option to allow me to accept followers who only follow N or less other users. I'd set mine to 100. I'll continue to routinely kick out troll followers manually until that day.

Re: Nearly a million users, and no spam or trolls - RussellBeattie.com

Tom — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 15:41:00 -0000

IM is synchronous at the level of the individual message, but Twitter isn't. Twitter lets you dip in and out of the conversation whenever you feel like it, which makes it more like email than IM, but the interface and user experience is IM-like.

Re: Nearly a million users, and no spam or trolls - RussellBeattie.com

Harry Lime — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 15:02:44 -0000

IM is asynchronous as well, as the message isn't transmitted until the user clicks a button. A synchronous form of text would be Unix's talk, where every keystroke is transmitted.

Re: Nearly a million users, and no spam or trolls - RussellBeattie.com

Douglas — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 14:28:30 -0000

Push vs. pull etc.

Re: Nearly a million users, and no spam or trolls - RussellBeattie.com

Joshua — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 14:25:21 -0000

I'm not so sure about twitter not having any spam or troll issues. It's like Syndrome said in The Incredibles: "When everyone's an incredible, no one is." The same goes for public sharing of everything. When everything is public, the notion of public sharing doesn't exist, and a lot of the "issues" commonly associated with public sharing are overlooked.

Re: Nearly a million users, and no spam or trolls - RussellBeattie.com

jason — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 14:05:05 -0000

There's not much spam but it's hard to actually reach someone, especially someone you don't know yet.

Re: Nearly a million users, and no spam or trolls - RussellBeattie.com

Glenn Fleishman — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 13:50:45 -0000

As others have noted, blocking a user prevents spam after a single attempt. While I have hundreds of followers now, and some have obviously spammy/SEO names, I don't get bothered by them. And, when a colleague I happen to not really be interested in either following or having follow me tried to follow me recently, I simply blocked them. (The colleague uses their real name, so they could set up another twitter account under another name and follow me there [if they knew I blocked him or her], but that would mean having two different accounts being monitored in different ways.) Twitter is largely passive about things that are actively anti-social in social networking systems. When I block someone, they don't know they've been blocked. I just disappear off their field of vision.

Re: Nearly a million users, and no spam or trolls - RussellBeattie.com

Jack — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 22:25:00 -0000

Obviously, this works both ways: you also won't learn about anyone else you might want to follow, because you're only seeing posts by those you already follow. That's unlike a system like the WELL (at least in the good old days), where you could always learn something new from an unexpected place.

In today's world, with search engines indexing Twitter pages, perhaps we can still find new stuff on Twitter using Google, but Twitter itself hasn't solved this problem.

Frankly, to me, learning about interesting new stuff is what the Internet is about. If I want to avoid dumb information on the net, I read a book.

Re: Nearly a million users, and no spam or trolls - RussellBeattie.com

Chris Rechtsteiner — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 13:55:24 -0000

Twitter is short attention span theatre IM. I can't find a better way to describe it.

Tremendous value as it forces you to think & communicate succinctly in a time when information glut is at an all time high. If anything comes from Twitter it should be the focus on concise & succinct communications. Everything else is superfluous.

Re: Nearly a million users, and no spam or trolls - RussellBeattie.com

brklynsurfer — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 13:01:21 -0000

Twitter has spam, I have 62 people following me and I know about 10 of them, the rest are mostly SEO types looking for a little link love.

Re: Nearly a million users, and no spam or trolls - RussellBeattie.com

chantelle — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 11:11:44 -0000

Channels and Oscars- Twittering the Oscars last night was great...
http://www.walrusmagazine.c...

Re: Nearly a million users, and no spam or trolls - RussellBeattie.com

Sam Brown — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 11:05:24 -0000

Don't forget the "* is now following you on Twitter" barrage that you get in your mailbox if someone constantly hits follow then unfollow then follow etc etc.

Obviously you can turn this feature off but by default it is on.

Re: Nearly a million users, and no spam or trolls - RussellBeattie.com

Jeremy Zilar — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 09:34:28 -0000

Agreed. I am really excited to see how the twitter community evolves over the next 5yrs.

Re: Nearly a million users, and no spam or trolls - RussellBeattie.com

whitneymcn — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 09:18:17 -0000

I've been thinking a lot about this social model recently. Twitter and the Tumblr "social blogging" tool have what I'm calling a "user-defined experience" or "aggregated community" model: each user defines their experience of the tool by who they follow. This does minimize spam, but what's more interesting about it to me is that it means that these tools are very social, but that there's no single community -- there is no "there" there, but in the best possible sense.

Rather than contributing to -- collaborating on the creation of -- a shared space, each Twitter/Tumblr user creates a thread and builds their own "there" out of all the available threads. Community through aggregation rather than community through collaboration.

Re: Nearly a million users, and no spam or trolls - RussellBeattie.com

ellybabes — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 09:16:54 -0000

Back in the early days there were some issues with Spam on Twitter. We had a couple of users back in July last year that appeared to be constantly deleting and re-adding their 'friends' in an effort to get noticed. Even blocking the user didn't seem to work (think there was a bug issue with that at the time).

However, Twitter support were excellent and checked into the guys account and reacted by removing his 'friending' privileges. That's also one of the reasons that the level of any spamming and trolling has stayed low, the support desk has reacted quickly to complaints.

Re: Nearly a million users, and no spam or trolls - RussellBeattie.com

Giles Turnbull — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 08:57:41 -0000

There is spam on Twitter (see http://twitter.com/Twittter... and http://twitter.com/layhandy for example), but its impact is limited thanks to the design of the system that will only let you see stuff from people you have agreed to see stuff from. Twitter spammers only trouble the people who make the decision to follow them. That doesn't stop the spammers from following as many people as they can, and those people getting the resulting one-off "So-and-so is now folllowing you on Twitter!" email alerts.

It's not annoying (yet), but I fear it will expand very quickly. Both those examples I gave cropped up in my inbox within the last fortnight or so, I think there will be more to come yet.

The built-in "Block this user" functionality comes in very useful. The more Twitter users who make use of it, the less likely it is that the spammers will persist.