When Britney arrives, the party’s over: a suggestion for Twitter
How do you know something has arrived? When it becomes a channel for spam.
For those of who who don’t use Twitter: you probably do know that it’s been the social media darling for some time now, even with its ongoing reliability issues. I’m a fan; I love simplicity, and Twitter eschews the feature creep that makes these types of social tools annoying and lets you just talk to people who you find interesting, and listen to people you find interesting. Conversations start easily, and continue and grow. It’s low overhead, useful, and fun.
While Twitter is utterly opt in - you don’t see anybody’s stuff unless you ask for it and you can’t talk to anybody who doesn’t “follow” you - one useful feature has become a spammer’s tool: notifications that someone is following you. If you log into Twitter and find my page and click “follow,” I’ll get an email letting me know that.
This is good; I can see who you are and decide if I want to follow you in return.
Of course, it also means that while nobody can force their tweets on you, anybody can force one of those emails on you. (Unless you turn the notification off - but then you don’t know if real, interesting people are now following you.)
I’ve been getting those messages from nutritional supplements, buxom young women with numbers in their names “Kristi12345″ and such), and other people who seem a bit less than real for a while. But it’s kicked into high gear; I did a bit of Twittering the other day and was bombarded with them.
This is when any social networking tool becomes as annoying as a MySpace page with overlapping photos and bad music playing, and you start to wonder, “Why bother?”
The spam follow message that I think qualified as the Twitter harbinger of doom:
When a faux Britney Spears is in the house, the mainstream spammers have discovered how to annoy you, and it’s over.
Okay, that was a bit melodramatic. What it means is that Twitter needs to deal with spammers or users will get annoyed. And - hi Twitter! - I have a suggestion.
When someone follows you, you can follow them back, ignore them, or click a “block” button which suppresses any notice about them whatsoever. That’s what I do when Britney and her palls show up toting a list of porn sites, little blue pills, and guaranteed weight loss aids.
Here’s what Twitter should do - monitor what percentage of a user’s follow messages result in getting blocked, and when it crosses a threshhold - say, five or ten percent - deactivate the user’s account and review it to see if it is spam.
It’s a relatively hard system to game - you can’t hit that block button unless the user actually chooses to follow you, so you can’t pick on anybody who’s not bothering you. One person can’t do anything; it takes the aggregate action of everybody being followed to make anything happen.
And it depends on a sign from the community of Twitter users that someone is being a sociopath.
If you set up a Twitter feed for an organization and write about it on your web site and invite users to follow you to get updates, you won’t get blocked - you’re not spamming people with follow messages. Those who want to use Twitter as a broadcast medium but don’t want to bug anyone will be fine.
It’s the spammers, who steal from us all by grabbing bits of our attention for things we don’t care about, who’ll be caught - as long as users block them. (Twitter would need to tell everyone that “block” is the correct choice when you’ve been spammed.
So how about it, Twitter?
More posts about Twitter:
- Broadcasting on Twitter
- Vacation (or, what would your mother Twitter?)
- What’s across the social media chasm?
- Will spam kill Twitter?
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While I am a big fan of the simplicity of Twitter, I am starting to become quite annoyed at the total lack of account administration features. I would like to go through my entire list of follows, a modest 140+, but the time it will take prevents me from wanting to.
I should be able to see some simple stats (followers, following, last tweet, etc.) on all of my followers without having to check each individual page. When I get a new follower, I was check their “follow ratio.” Those that follow 10x the people that follow them get blocked immediately.
In the end, Twitter has spent too much time building capacity without giving users the freedom to control (read: protect) their own accounts; the bedrock of successful Web 2.0 services.
grrr. spammers nearly destroyed craigslist though lately it seems relatively under control (in that not every other car ad is for e.g. a 2006 Honda hybrid for $5000).
I’m not sure what result twitter spammers hope to achieve, though, given the way it’s set up. once blocked they’re of no concern, but I guess stealing a minute or so of my time is evil enough.
I have been blocking the twit-spammers for week or two now. Another Twitter person told me about this problem so I am responding.
When I get a notice someone is following me I check their profile and recent posts. In addition to looking at what they are twitting about (first clue), I check how many ppl they follow vs how many follow them. If the following/follower ration is more than 10/1 (eg following 1000; followed by 100) that is a second clue. It tells me this person is probably adding random people and hoping to get
suckers, er, followers in return. I am not interested in that.Very interesting post. I’ve noticed some odd names following me, but I never thought about whether they were spam or not. Just today, I’ve had porn23 and porn24 sign up as following me. I didn’t even think about blocking them because I figured they can’t write me directly anyway, and if they want to see what I, and the thousands they say they’re following, are saying, then it’s on them. However, with what you’re suggesting, maybe I should take some time to block them; I just worry that they’d get a different email address and sign in again, as I believe the two porns above are the same person. What’s your thought on that?