I got fed up with Twitter's lack of enthusiasm in blocking these accounts so I whipped up a quick proof of concept a while ago. The amount of trivial-to-detect cryptocurrency scams in replies to popular accounts was so high that I put together a hacky PoC: https://gist.github.com/lorenzhs/864353c202112a38de17ed054f3... -- the scammers' messages have changed now, the messages no longer match that particular filter, but it worked for weeks without Twitter doing anything.
I got fed up with Twitter's lack of enthusiasm in blocking all sorts of shitposts that I stopped using it. I've been significantly less angry ever since...
Is it for some reason not a viable solution to just stop following people who shitpost? Or does Twitter push random users' posts at you? I ask because I've been circling around Twitter for a month or so, but if you can't isolate yourself from public tweets, I'm definitely not going to jump in.
If I may make a suggestion, and I'm not sure what your use-case plans are for it -- maybe this isn't feasible for you, but if you absolutely MUST use Twitter, do not install it on your phone. Keep it to just the desktop website version. My reasons for suggesting this are three-fold: 1) Twitter at it's core is, IMO, nothing but a distraction. You will be less productive and less interactive with real people in real life. 2) The Internet Fuckwad Theory is in full effect in the Twitter-verse at all times. Depending on your personality, it may very well make you more depressed/mad/whatever -- it's not going to change your daily life for the better at any rate. 3) Twitter tracks you & harvests your data, and if you install it on your phone they will have much more data about/from you -- and we (as in, everyone on the planet) do not need any more tracking/spying/snooping/etc.
It is certainly viable. I follow an interesting group of users and unfollow anyone who becomes problematic. There are some "Promoted" tweets that are essentially ads, but they are easy to ignore if not interesting.
I don't think I see any ads using Tweetbot. I may also miss some features, but don't really care about that. I like that my Twitter feed is just a stream of tweets.
I don't think your parent makes judgement on the value of any political position. Trolls here just refers to people who are shouting without contributing to the discussion.
What they're saying is that once any user has a sufficiently large following the replies to their tweets with any signal are lost in the noise of unrelated political rantings (both sides) and scam bots hoping to take advantage of the exposure that replying to big users has.
These groups both manipulate the rankings. Political ravings are upvoted by the similarly inclined politicals. The bots work in swarms to favourite their own posts and reply with "Wow, worked for me, thanks!"
i find complaints against twitter to be somewhat alien because it is a fairly major source of good content for me. as an example, i just browsed my twitter for a minute or so on my phone and came across a discussion on programming languages, some cool generative artwork, an article on continuations, and i learned of david attenborough's new documentary on bioluminescence.
and i recently went to a design conference where i saw bret victor give a great talk. i found out about the conference on twitter.
This is the sort of experience I’m looking for. Specifically, there’s a number of writers/journalists who I’d like to follow and Twitter seems ideal for following them.
So what do you think the causal difference is between your experience and others? Are you just more diligent about curating the list of people you follow?
i suppose i have a higher bar for clicking follow. and yes, i will unfollow people who annoy me in any way. haha. so i end up having this collection of artists, designers, programmers, musicians, etc. who post interesting content. you can check out who i follow. same username as here.
Like the GP said, to get people angry by getting them to argue publicly using 140 character sarcastic quips (though limit has increased recently). The angrier they get the more they post, the more they post, the angrier others get, and so on. Therefore lots of engagement and activity. With bots around, and some probably with better AI, it is much easier to "engage" a lot more people on a lot more topics at the same time.
And it is interesting to watch because people get into arguments trying to convince each other seemingly but in 140 characters it just sounds insulting and terse. Well sometimes it is simply insulting: "Oh you called me a stupid idiot! Of course, that's a great point. I will step back and ponder an alternative approach to this problem"
You know, the best metaphor I've heard, and how I've started treating it ever since: Twitter is like a cocktail party that you can enter and leave any time of the day, for as long or as short as you'd like. You might participate in some interesting conversations, you might learn about something new, and then when you're done you can leave.
The thing you don't want to do is try to keep up with every tweet. Just follow a bunch of people you find interesting, and once in a while pop in and see what people are talking about.
I tried to make Twitter work for me by only following people I am genuinely interested in. (Founders, CEO's, etc) but even after that I am not engaged.
Most consumption-oriented social media is "like an RSS reader". HN is a news aggregator with a forum bolted onto the bottom of the stories.
What is Facebook? It's an RSS feed of your friends and family's lives. Facebook has replaced Blogger et al, which primarily syndicated through actual RSS, because it was an accessible, simple way to a) create a feed and b) allow publishers to retain some control over their content (by e.g. blocking an undesirable consumer).
You had to have some technical competency to set up a blog and an RSS reader, and all Facebook did was fix that and bring the power of syndication to the RSS-incapable masses.
As far as I'm concerned, Twitter's value proposition is that it's supposed to be a continuous, temporary real-time vein on whatever is happening at that moment. It doesn't really do a good job of that filling that niche IMO. The only time I've had an impulse to use Twitter is during something like a live news event, and these days I think something like Snapchat does this better (though they're both infuriatingly difficult to access and navigate, decimating their practical utility).
In practice Twitter has regressed to the lowest common denominator of "microblogging". The thing that continues to give it power is its interactivity. Because the messages are so short and feel so quick, Twitter ensures that people will see our message, react, and that hits our feedback loops ASAP, demanding follow-on after follow-on.
One interpretation of today's Twitter is that it's just the unwashed masses clamoring for a fleeting glimpse of attention from someone they admire. This corresponds with Twitter's early adoption as a celebrity messaging platform for actors (iirc Ashton Kutcher was the first Twitter user to get 1M followers).
The only time Twitter's current incarnation is useful is when it allows the everyman to get a message to someone else who would be guarded, e.g., common citizens potentially inciting a credible presidential campaign as in the infamous Russ_Steinberg tweet [0] .
It's depressing to think that so much behavior hinges on this rabid attention-vying, but it's also impossible to deny the power when some otherwise-inaccessible influence is established. I assume this is why people continue to use it, despite the fact that 99% of tweets drop into the void.
Its size has attracted a number of companies or 'significant' individuals that provide regular updates on activities exclusively through this platform. For instance SpaceX, Elon Musk, NASA, etc have chosen to use Twitter as a primary PR platform.
The reason these companies use it as a PR platform is obvious - there's a lot of users. I can't even fathom why it has lots of users though, at least not without mocking the state of society today.
at some level it's similar to instagram/snapchat stories where you can get brief updates from people you know
in other cases entire subcultures that used to exist on forums have mainly moved to twitter, like the fighting game community or somethingawful-style humor
then a lot of people like to use it to follow celebrities, musicians or industry leaders
I don't see how that is "begging the question", which means "to assume the truth of the conclusion of an argument in the premises in order for the conclusion to follow."
Twitter is great for following popular figures and companies. Users can receive news briefs directly from these sources. Often I will read internet journalism about tweets I read a day after I read them on Twitter.
Being on Twitter is like being at an on-call press conference with all of your subjects of interest 24 hours a day. It's actually pretty bad ass. It's not all heavy with prose. It's heavy with meaning.
Unlike my Facebook network, which is almost entirely composed of friends and family, my Twitter network is composed of prominent figures, projects, and companies in which I am intensely interested
For example, I am an American and I have a passing interest in politics. I follow the President of our Great Union, who is an avid tweeter. I prefer to interpret the news as it happens, through my own unique filter and perspective. Later, I read how others interpreted it. It can be a fun contrast and I prefer to be ahead of the punch, so to speak.
I wouldn't call it shitposting but snarky identity-politics (all left, right, up and down) driven replies/tweet storms (which generally have nothing to do with the original post) are why I only look at "what you've missed" every few days on Twitter.
This is a great effort. I wrote about this at the end of January (https://research.satnam.co/2018/01/30/scammers-impersonating...) and was working on a script last month that did the same thing but I was searching the Streaming API for specific keywords that I knew were triggers for their tweets. I set-up a Twitter account to also identify and report these scammers accounts. The problem I was having was I did not account for the variety of currencies that were being utilized, so I had to write new regexes for the different address types. By then, they had switched up tactics and I hadn't followed up on it since.
Can we just shut down twitter already? It seems like something made for marketing purposes that was pushed on people and wound up harmful. (Granted, that’s not practical.)
While there are issues with Twitter not doing enough to ban bots, the platform is a festinating example of the complexity of balancing free speech and censorship.
Twitter is not an effective discussion platform imo. Facebook, in my experience at least, makes it pretty damned hard to find active, technical communities.
