An audience of two

Tuesday July 08, 2008

Why You Should Care About Twitter Spam: A rebuttal
@kevinchu wrote an interesting piece on Twitter spam. This was sparked by a conversation in which I expressed the view that it's not worth the bother of blocking the spammers.

First off, let me confirm the obvious: Twitter is a very useful service, which has had rapid growth and consequently is having some scalability problems. There are alternatives, such as Plurk, FriendFeed, Identi.ca (do your own damn links) but none of them have the simplicity, power and mindshare that Twitter has. I am happy with Twitter and want it to succeed.

Kevin compares twitter spammers to arsonists, damaging the system. I think that's a little alarmist. I would compare them to the plastic rings that hold cans of soda. Remember how we were all encouraged to cut them up so they wouldn't harm wildlife?

Let's look at some numbers. Right now I have 172 followers (F). Let's say that my daily tweet count (C) is around 25. Now assuming that the load on the system is equal to F * C then my daily impact is 4300. If 25% of the people following me are spammers (by any definition that you care to provide) then blocking those spammers would reduce my impact on the system by 1000. (Of course this assumes that blocking actually helps; I don't know how Twitter is coded, so if blocking is implemented as an independent blacklist then we could in fact be increasing the impact.)

By contrast, Robert Scoble has over 28,800 followers. He also tweets a damn sight more than I do. Every one of his tweets has the same impact as a week's worth of my tweets. Is it reasonable to expect the likes of Scoble - or Leo Laporte (>46,400) or Kevin Rose (>48,700) - to go through their lists and weed out spammers? I think not. Yet if they don't, my pitiful effort is the equivalent of trying to solve the energy crisis by unplugging my TV every night.

So how do twitter spammers work? Well for a start they follow you in the hope that you'll follow them. My philosophy is that anyone can follow me, but I choose who I want to follow. If you're replying to me I'll see your replies in the reply tab (when it's working) or I'll get a message since I track my own ID (except that track hasn't worked for several weeks). Following me won't get me to follow you.

The other tactic is to post messages that get attention. Common tactics are to re-tweet breaking news, and apparently they are now harvesting the public timeline for posts to retweet. Will blocking stop that? Not really. The thing about the public timeline is that it's, well, public. Anyone can read it. Once I tweet, or post a picture on twitpic, it's out in the public domain. Good luck trying to get it back. So a spammer with half a clue would use a separate account that wasn't being blocked by anyone for monitoring the public timeline so as to get the most out of it.

As I said at the start, Twitter has scaling problems. They need to address those problems without impacting the real users. The broken features need to be fixed. Yes I want to help, but is my blocking fake users really going to help? Not until Twitter implements a system that measures how many people are blocking an account and takes action accordingly.

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Tags: networks social spam twitter