<story><title>Twitter doesn&apos;t care about spam?</title><url>https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1487022342630957062</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ryanSrich</author><text>Crazy how we can have such different experiences. I follow less than 100 accounts and easily 50% of the responses are always spam&amp;#x2F;scams. It makes Twitter almost unusable for me.&lt;p&gt;The most ironic part is that Twitter will show the spam&amp;#x2F;scams, but hide other replies, from real people, that Twitter thinks are mean.</text></item><item><author>jsnell</author><text>Option d: nobody outside of the Twitter TnS teams (including Paul Graham) has any idea of what Twitter is detecting as spam and what not, and thus can&amp;#x27;t actually judge how good a job is being done.&lt;p&gt;First, we don&amp;#x27;t see the spam that was outright blocked, so we have no idea of what the false negative rate is. Second, I bet that this is not a binary block&amp;#x2F;allow decision, but there are all kinds of ways of reducing the engagement that probable spam gets without outright blocking. The latter is operationally preferable since it reduces the cost of false positives and since it makes the iteration loop for the spammers a lot slower.&lt;p&gt;(But also, I can&amp;#x27;t remember when I last saw spam in my Twitter feed.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stevage</author><text>I follow around 1000. I see almost zero spam. This whole thread is pretty confusing to me.</text></comment>
<story><title>Twitter doesn&apos;t care about spam?</title><url>https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1487022342630957062</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ryanSrich</author><text>Crazy how we can have such different experiences. I follow less than 100 accounts and easily 50% of the responses are always spam&amp;#x2F;scams. It makes Twitter almost unusable for me.&lt;p&gt;The most ironic part is that Twitter will show the spam&amp;#x2F;scams, but hide other replies, from real people, that Twitter thinks are mean.</text></item><item><author>jsnell</author><text>Option d: nobody outside of the Twitter TnS teams (including Paul Graham) has any idea of what Twitter is detecting as spam and what not, and thus can&amp;#x27;t actually judge how good a job is being done.&lt;p&gt;First, we don&amp;#x27;t see the spam that was outright blocked, so we have no idea of what the false negative rate is. Second, I bet that this is not a binary block&amp;#x2F;allow decision, but there are all kinds of ways of reducing the engagement that probable spam gets without outright blocking. The latter is operationally preferable since it reduces the cost of false positives and since it makes the iteration loop for the spammers a lot slower.&lt;p&gt;(But also, I can&amp;#x27;t remember when I last saw spam in my Twitter feed.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>SkyMarshal</author><text>I follow around 5000, zero spam.&lt;p&gt;Everyone I follow is computer science or software engineering focused though, so maybe Twitter&amp;#x27;s algorithm can easily recognize my preference and fill my timeline with related tweets.&lt;p&gt;Maybe someone who follows a more diverse set of interests will get more diverse tweets in their timeline, more likely to include spam.&lt;p&gt;Just a guess, dunno for sure.</text></comment>