
New Twitter Anti-Spam Bot Causes Chaos - sant0sk1
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/new_twitter_anti-spam_bot_causes_chaos.php
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river_styx
Do these guys not test their code before they deploy it to production?

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olefoo
Only weak code is 'released'.

Great code Escapes, and leaves a bloody trail of unwary beta testers behind.

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joshwa
How is "following back" each of the 20,000 people that follow a corporate or
prominent blogger account on twitter a legitimate use? Nobody can read that
firehose.

It seems like people are overloading the "following" feature --rather than a
subscription to the user's content, instead people are using it like a "karma"
vote. Maybe they need to separate the two.

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simonw
Agreed - what's wrong with following @ replies, or just using
search.twitter.com ?

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nirmal
I'm sure that if I go through my follower's list I have a lot of people that
are twitter "ladies-of-the-night" but I don't follow them so they are not spam
to me. I thought that was the whole point of the asymmetric following
mechanism. Users choose who they want to be spammed by.

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joshwa
It's spam for two reasons:

1) The default setting for a long time (not sure about now) was that you'd get
an email every time someone new followed you.

2) For those folks looking to make actual social connections on Twitter, it's
next to impossible to notice when someone actually interesting starts
following you-- the signal-to-noise on the followers lists means that it'll
get drowned out. I've had some really interesting leads go stale as a result
of this.

