Can Twitter Survive What is About to Happen to It?

http://www.twine.com/item/123c9051b-g8/can-twitter-survive-what-is-about-to-happen-to-it

by nreece • 17 years ago

53 37 17 years ago

ams1• 17 years ago

how many times does it need to be said? there is no spam on twitter. you just unfollow. (http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2009/02/09/a_twitter_d...)

cperciva• 17 years ago

Unfollow doesn't help with @reply and search/hashtag spam.

technoweenie• 17 years ago

You can block those spammy users. Kind of a pain though... and the various clients would have to add a quick user blocking button.

tlrobinson4• 17 years ago

You can set Twitter to only show @replies from people you follow, but that's obviously less than ideal.

mechanical_fish• 17 years ago

I can see how this might be a problem.

But before we dig into this problem, let us pause for a moment and reflect on the age-old terrible plight of the tool developer. Twitter developed a tool that could not be spammed. So the users went busily to work, layering a spammable protocol on top of it. And now those users demand that someone figure out how to keep the spam out of their spammable protocol. In the meantime, Twitter gains a reputation as a system that's filled with spam.

Perhaps it is time for a corollary to Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment: "Every social application evolves until it fills up with spam. Those that cannot be filled up with spam are replaced by those that can." Though I guess Doctorow proposed this theory years ago when he wrote All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites:

http://craphound.com/complexecosystems.txt

lrm242• 17 years ago

Ok, it isn't spam. It's a denial of twitter attack. :)

forsaken• 17 years ago

I replied to this on my blog:

http://ericholscher.com/blog/2009/mar/15/twitter-spam/

A basic outline of my arguments:

Hypertweeting/Notification Overload: Unfollow

Hashtag spam: Same as real spam problem, just need selective aggregators that only follow certain people, or some sort of (bayesian?) filtering.

@reply spam: True, but could be solved by clients, and the rate limiting on the api means that you have a low chance of being spammed this way. Plus it's really easy to systematically catch.

old-gregg• 17 years ago

Ughh... I wish there was a HN feature: custom filters, i.e. a regexp one could use to filter out irrelevant (to him/her) news: twitter, facebook, .+ionaire - all these would be in my filter: I'm an engineer and I'm not interested in media/entertainment/advertisement business, yet sometimes they occupy well over half of the front page. I assume this happens due to a widespread belief that building a media company is how a programmer can "make it" these days. Twitter, Walt Disney, Austin American Statesman or AutoTrader - there is no difference and all of them are of no interest to a programmer: they're not "high-tech" companies. Sure, they employ programmers and can't be run without computers, but that applies to every business in 2009

Custom filtering would also allow me to see promising submissions to bubble up to my start page, taking the spots of killed media/hype/iphone/getrich-with-3-lines-of-javascript stories.

I wanted to write such UI myself and just let it be - i.e. I'd crawl HN and generate my own front page but I suspect Paul wouldn't be happy about it.

mixmax• 17 years ago

a widespread belief that building a media company is how a programmer can "make it" - I've noticed that too, and I think it's bollocks.

It's much smarter to go after a niche market where you can easily make milliions instead of shooting for the one in a million chance that you'll make the next facebook. Chances are you won't.

wallflower3• 17 years ago

I'd love to read a book styled along the lines of "The Millionaire Next Door". Call it "The Entrepreneur in the Woodwork" - profiles/statistics on eBook sellers, ISVs (especially niche business apps), niche site owners, niche iPhone app studios, the mythical highly profitable subscription sites (salsabootcamp.com is one), the gadget blogs that make mint from affiliate links (coolest-gadgets.com), maybe even some non mainstream blogs. Cap the success level though - no outliers - Leave out the JohnChow.com Adwords or Dooce.com anomalies.

I think it might be hard to find these people to interview though. Domain records and traffic stats and presence can be false starts.

krschultz3• 17 years ago

Especially a niche enterprise market. Consumers are fickle and frugal. Companies are looking for a way to do more while paying less. A lot of times, what is "less" to them is a huge amount to you.

tlrobinson4• 17 years ago

Use GreaseMonkey/UserScripts. You wouldn't have to crawl Hacker News, just visit it normally, remove the offending posts with JavaScript. I think there's already some out there, just search.

froo• 17 years ago

  I assume this happens due to a widespread belief that building a media company is how a programmer can "make it" these days.

Yes in part, but there are also some coders out there who take genuine interest in these things.

Take, for example, me - I'm not the best coder in the world by any stretch of the imagination but I've had a unexplainable passion for animation for about as long as I can remember.

I originally thought the way to "make it" was to follow in other's footsteps, make a web app, flip it etc, but I wholly believe that for this kind of thing to work your heart really needs to be in it. For me this wasn't the case.

This is why I'm following a path that I'm genuinely interested in. The kind of thing that makes me jump out of bed with excitement in the morning and keeps me going until the wee hours in the evening.

It's not a case of thinking about the payoff at the end of day as the only motivation for me to do what I'm doing (although its never too far from my mind) but it's the process I'm obsessed with and the potential of changing the game that keeps me intrigued.

There's just so much ground that has yet been unexplored and I think really, this is the most exciting part of the whole process.

vorador• 17 years ago

What about an HN API ? For instance, the user may define a cgi perl script that gets called with the name of each submission every time the front page is loaded...

dejb• 17 years ago

Actually I'm just the opposite. I prefer hacking media and business to code. I'm more interested in how twitter will fight spam than how erlang can scale. Each to their own but I see this as a kind of 'Business for (ex)coders'.

Tichy• 17 years ago

My impression is that you have no idea what Twitter actually is. Maybe you should read one of the articles about it once in a while?

dsims• 17 years ago

Even if Twitter Search somehow becomes useless due to spam, Twitter itself will continue to be useful.

wallflower3• 17 years ago

The non-spamming Twitter community might be able to handle the problem collectively.

I think a 'Flag' API/feature that is similar to Craig's List would work. One vote does not mark you a known spammer, but if many users flag you and your tweets as spam, Twitter could throttle/disable your reply capabilities.

jackowayed2• 17 years ago

They already kind of do that, mostly targeted at spam-following (following lots of people to get their attention for your spam). A large number of people blocking the user and/or having a high following/follower ratio (following many times as many people as follow you) get you looked at for spam.

But for now, neither spam @replies (which happen occasionally too) nor spam #hashtags violate the TOS, I believe.

jacobscott3• 17 years ago

I would be more worried about the "it" that is facebook providing a better experience for their core usecases.

From what I can tell, given the new Facebook UI, all Facebook needs to do to implement twitter is:

* Streamline directed relationships (fan versus friend) for "follow" functionality

* Streamline status privacy settings (so that changing your status can be equivalent to a tweet)

* Write lite.facebook.com that looks just like twitter/jaiku/etc

In addition, it seems to me that Facebook has the following advantages over twitter:

* Funding: 500mm versus 50mm

* Scale Facebook has many more users and engineers

* Platform/Apps Facebook has a rich platform, twitter doesn't

Thoughts?

wallflower3• 17 years ago

The biggest difference between Twitter and Facebook updates (at the moment) is that your Facebook news feed is limited by who you have some connection to (albeit possibly very tenuous). The beauty (and ugliness) of Twitter is that it's interest or topic-based - you don't need a pre-existing connection to start following or viewing someone's public tweets.

That being said, I will be sad if Twitter is subsumed by Google or Facebook.

EDIT: Technically easy but Facebook is a good walled-garden (privacy controls). I don't know if they'll let some public weeds in just to compete with Twitter. Twitter allowing Facebook users to auto-post an update to their Twitter identity could work.

jacobscott3• 17 years ago

So Facebook makes it easier to post public news feed items, and then writes a twitter-like UI on top of that data. There are obviously subtle usability issues here, but technically it seems straightforward...

krschultz3• 17 years ago

The next thing that is about to happen to it, is that Facebook ripped off its model completely with the new front page and status updates. Although it doesn't allow for a lot of means of tweeting, it is already happening - I noticed several conversations today that spawned off status updates. None of my group is on twitter, it will offer no compelling reason to switch now.

jackowayed2• 17 years ago

except that, for me at least, the new Facebook is filled with noise to an extent that Twitter won't be for a long time.

I only follow people that I actually want to know about. But being a Facebook friend, up until now, has been much more than seeing occasional newsfeed updates. I've never said "I'll be friends with this person so I'll see their stati," it's always, "I'll be friends so that they can invite me to parties and write on my wall."

Over the last couple days, I've been frantically hiding newsfeed updates from people that I don't care about.

Twitter has the advantage over Facebook in that really the only reason to follow someone is to get their tweets. Soon, friending someone and hiding their updates will be something I think of as one action on Facebook.

krschultz3• 17 years ago

I agree with frantically hiding newsfeed items, there must have been 20 people I forgot were in my contacts that popped up into my newsfeed, I'm not a huge fan of it - but it really undercuts Twitter.

tlrobinson4• 17 years ago

As they point out, number of followers is, unfortunately, a very poor metric. Yesterday someone posted an article called "Top 237 Twitter Users Who Will Follow You Back" (http://socialnewswatch.com/top-twitter-users/).

As an experiment, a sort of Twitter honeypot you could say, I followed every single one of them on a fresh dummy account, using a simple Ruby script with the Twitter gem.

Less than a day later I already have more followers than the original 237 I added. I haven't posted a single tweet, so no one has any valid reason to follow me, except to try to gain more followers.

I suspect many of them will unfollow me shortly, after they realize I won't follow them back. I'm saving all the "new follower" emails I get from Twitter, and in another day or so I'll compare them to my remaining followers to see who's guilty.

The vast majority of the unsolicited followers are people peddling some sort of bullshit get-rich-quick MLM scheme.

raamdev• 17 years ago

To help with the comparison, you can get emails when people unfollow you too: http://useqwitter.com/

Zev• 17 years ago

qwitter isn't very useful; It only seems to work sporadically for a few minutes at a time. I know I've lost followers without getting a message from it.

danw• 17 years ago

It's asymmetric. If someone irritating you, stop following. This is a non issue.

diN0bot• 17 years ago

The twitter management apps make a big difference. It's like looking at email without spam filters or automatic folders and say-- man! the signal will never make it through! --yet most of us use email daily with no trouble.

cosmo7• 17 years ago

Much as I love the tweets, Twitter's signal:noise ratio has always been very close to zero, so I don't think spammers will be able to ruin it the way they ruined Usenet.

dschobel• 17 years ago

Perhaps twitter should restrict its content to tweets about Erlang for a day or so.

Can Twitter Survive What is About to Happen to It?

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