

Ask HN: Twitter and Spam - DanielBMarkham

Hi guys,<p>I finally succumbed to the crowd and joined Twitter this past weekend. (Yay! danielbmarkham)<p>I still don't understand it, but I figure I need to play around with it some to at least give it a shot.<p>And almost immediately I'm starting to get followers. Double yay!<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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tptacek
Don't pay attention to your followers. Don't reciprocate followers. Follow
people who interest you, or who you've exchanged messages with. I've had zero
problem with Twitter spam, but then, I just use Twitter. I don't fret about
what my follower list looks like.

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ErrantX
Even worse are the ones that seem legit for a long time (like a month or more
- I suspect regenerating other ppl's tweets, but I've never tested that) and
then start to "spam" subtely. Bloody clever and I've clicked links w/o even
slightly imagining they were spam.

Im 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 :)

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DanielBMarkham
Maybe the answer is just to follow people you know?

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.

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greengirl512
If you have too many people in your feed to track, you need an app that sorts
them for you so that you see tweets from the most important/interesting people
in your stream first (not necessarily people you know).

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!

~~~
greengirl512
Well, you would if I could find you...Twitter can't find anyone named
danielbmarkham.

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DanielBMarkham
That's weird, copied directly from the page it's:

danielbmarkham

must be typo somewhere or something?

~~~
greengirl512
Too weird...here's what I'm getting:

Name results for: danielbmarkham

Search for a username, first or last name

Did you mean daniel garnham ?

We couldn't find anyone named danielbmarkham.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Using this? <http://twitter.com/#search?q=danielbmarkham>

Maybe it's a database replication issue -- although I've been on for several
days now.

~~~
greengirl512
That worked...one more non-spam follower for you!

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agotterer
Recently the spam followers have been increasing at a faster pace. I would say
of the last 15 followers that added me at least 10 were spam. I'm also stating
to notice more spam when doing a search for a trending topic. Hopefully
twitter can get this under control. I'm not sure why they dont have a "spam"
or "flag" button on @replies, messages and on the follow pages.

~~~
tjweir
Send: @spam @<Account name of spammer>

Or you can directly message @spam

<http://twitter.com/spam>

~~~
jemmons
Normally you have to be followed by someone in order to DM them. Note this is
_not_ true with the spam account. There's a special hack in the code to allow
for this, so "d spam" away!

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yan
Well those followers don't generate any traffic, their sole act of spamming is
just following you. I'd just ignore it. And I think you just got +1 actual
follower.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Well their sole act of spamming might be simply following me, but really it's
a neat little trick.

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.

~~~
joshfinnie
Twitter imposed a 2000 follower limit because of that exact fact. You can
never be following more than 2000+(#_of_followers). So maybe you can make $$
and not $$$...

~~~
jacquesm
Lots of politicians are active on twitter, just too bad that only 2000 people
can follow them.

Any arbitrary limit is wrong. They should crowdsource the spam problem, not
block legitimate users from interacting with each other.

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Jem
You can report them to twitter by way of direct message to
<http://twitter.com/spam> (although none of the spammers I've reported have
been removed)

You can also block them, but I don't think this achieves much.

Alternatively, just ignore them (my preferred method).

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felixmar
Keyword spam is another issue. Yesterday i was watching a Microsoft conference
on digitalwpc.com and it shows tweets with the #wpc09 keyword. Initially it
seemed nice to show tweets on the site, but spam (and sometimes stupid
comments) made it annoying after a while.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I'd like to learn more about the relationship between keywords and tweets.

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?)

~~~
diego
You may want to take a look at our app, <http://twist.flaptor.com/>

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...](http://twist.flaptor.com/trends?gram=child+abducted&span=168&start=2009071311&end=2009071405&hot=true)

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brk
I block them, which I believe helps identify them as spammers faster.

At the same time, deadbeat followers don't really cost YOU anything. Follow
and follow-back people that seem interesting or valuable to you.

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onreact-com
I largely ignore it but you can make your tweets private. That means people
have to apply to follow your updates.

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miracle
Every tweet is junk.

