/dev/null/kevin

If you don't care about Twitter then stop reading.

A while back I posted that Twitter needs to delete the follow-spammers.  There were three kinds of responses:

• Agree!
  
• Disagree!
• Then follow me on Twitter out of spite.
• "Why should I care?  It doesn't bother or affect me."

BTW, one of the comments from that post left a great link to Stop Twitter Spam!  Check it out for lots of details.

For the "It doesn't affect me, why should I care?" crowd, here is your answer: It does affect you.

Let me first acknowledge that, yes, this is all Twitter's problem, and they need to fix it.  But it is also our problem and we should assist where we can.  Twitter, after all, is a social service so we must behave like social creatures.  A community is always stronger as a whole.

If you saw an arsonist lighting a fire would you try and stop them and/or put out the fire?  Or would you just say that this is the fire department's problem and ignore it?  Would you at least report the fire?  Would it make a difference if the fire was near your house or favorite winery?

If Twitter matters to you -- has value to you -- then you should care that your service could go away if Twitter can't fix the problems.  Are you just willing to jump to the next service, like plurk, FriendFeed or identi.ca?  If you are then you are forgetting that the value of Twitter is not the technology, but the social network itself that you've created.  Just because you are willing to switch to a different network doesn't mean that your other friends all will.  You won't be able to rebuild what you had.  It will be different, even if the underlying technology is better.  Remember that Twitter itself had no value until it reached a critical mass.  Twitter also has many useful tools built on top of its API.  Those tools also go away.

Thus, if you think that the follow-spammers don't affect you then you are wrong.  Even if they don't send you messages they are breaking the service that you use.  They are also making it more difficult for the Twitter staff to fix the problem if they are dealing with outages all of the time.

Finally, there is a new wrinkle to this story.  Since the whole point of follow-spammers is to ultimately get followed themselves (so you see their spam), the spammers have added retweeting to their arsenal of tricks.  What they are doing is taking normal tweets from the public timeline, or from people they are follow-spamming, and retweeting the text, plus their spam link.  This gives them the illusion of being a legitimate user and of having "meaningful" content, and that increases their hit chances.  How does this affect you?  They could be retweeting your posts.

Do you want the picture you sent of your child linked to porno-spammers site?  If anyone does a google (or summize) search they would be linked together, forever, along with you since you never blocked them as a spammer.

So, bottom line: everything affects you in a social network, so you should care.

I redid this old post as a Crappy Graph: