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Thursday May 29, 2008 | Twitter Needs to Delete the Spammers | Computers |
Twitter's performance problems are well known. Twitter, and everyone else, are trying to fix the problem. Here is my quick and dirty fix:
Kill the Spammers.
This is not a long term solution, but it may buy twitter some time to really fix the problem.
Twitter spammers don't actually spam, the don't send messages to you. What they do it follow you, and everyone else. Their hope is that you'll investigate their profile and then click on the web link (mine comes here to this blog). It may also boost their search engine ranking, I don't know.
However, this also puts an extra burden on twitter. Twitter's scale problems stem from the fact that the workload increases geometrically as every message people send is forwarded to each follower. The more followers people have, the slower twitter is. The follow-spammers just increase that load. Some of these spammers follow 25,000 people. That's 25,000 extra message each time any of those 25,000 tweet. There are hundreds of follow-spammers, so that's hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of extra tweets.
Again, removing the spammers won't solve any of Twitter's problems, but it might give them some breathing room to work. I think it would be easy to auto-detect most of these spammers. If you follow more than 10,000 people and have less than 1000 followers yourself, you are probably a spammer.
I have blocked some of my more obvious spammers, but I'm not 100% sure this helps. It depends on how Twitter implemented the blocking feature. Hopefully they aren't checking for blocks all of the time and that the block just removed the spammer from my follow list.
I checked the Twitter forums to see if this (seemingly obvious) suggestion has been made, but I didn't have too much time to look. I did find other people who have spammer problems, but I didn't find a discussion about Twitter removing them, or what kind of impact it would have (maybe it's just worth the trouble to them). So, lazyweb, if you know, give me a pointer.
Update 1: I posted my own suggestion to the forum, we'll see what the response it.
Update 2: Twitter has admitted that uses with lots of followers/followees severely tax the system. Then Rober Scoble (with his 20K+ of both) gets "blamed" for the problem. So, I think it's only a matter of time before the spammers get the spot light. To be clear, I don't blame Scoble. He is a legitimate user. Non-human spam listeneres and spam bots can be eliminated to (temporarily) free up resources so Scoble is free to tell us he is safe after earthquakes. It's all still on Twitter's shoulders to fix the scaling problems.
Tags: scoble spam twitter
May 29, 2008 04:20 PM PDT Permalink | Comments [3] |
Comments:
I don't care about the "spammers" that follow you. I don't follow them. I see no reason to block anyone who wants to "follow" me, whether they are really interested in what I'm saying or not. The strain it puts on Twitter's infrastructure is Twitter's problem, not mine.
What I do object to are the bots that just spew random tweets. I use the "track" feature to follow certain subjects and last week my cellphone got hammered by bots retweeting links concerning the Summit Fire in the Santa Cruz Mountains. I ended up having to block half a dozen accounts that each had about 30K tweets and zero followers.
When Twitter goes down then it's your problem, if you care. It might be Twitter's fault, but still your problem.
If both the 'bots and the "passive" spam-followers affect the performance then they need to be dealt with. Even if Twitter fixes the root problems with the scaling, 'bots and spammers will fill the extra capacity created much faster than humans alone.
100% agree that the follow-spammers share much of the blame for Twitter's stability problems. Many of these spammers use "micro-blogging automation tools" to follow a massive amount of people in a short amount of time. Regarding Twitter's position against spammers, they are responding to it by either crippling the accounts (removing follow privileges, removing tweets from the public timelines, etc.) or removing the accounts altogether. You can report spammers using the 'spam request' on this page: http://twitter.com/help
Posted by Stop Twitter Spam on May 30, 2008 at 10:36 AM PDT #
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Kevin Chu, Some Rights Reserved.
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