Spammers Gaming the Twitter System?
I’m not sure what’s going on in the Twitterverse, but I’ve been getting a lot of followers without notification lately. I can only imagine two possibilities:
- Twitter’s email notification is not working at 100%, and messages are being dropped (they’re not showing up in my spam box, either) or not sent at all.
- Spammers have found a way to game the system by following people without them being notified.
I hope it’s number 1, but I’m pretty sure it’s number 2. Every stealth follower I’ve had, with the exception of 2 or 3 has been a spam account. I have also gotten notification messages from legitemate followers in between getting followed by spammers, which leads me to lean more toward the first.
I’m posting this here, because I don’t want to send it to just @ev and @biz.
Please, Twitter, investigate this. I’m betting I’m not nearly the only person seeing this, and many people just may not be noticing. Keeping the spammers away from this system is the only way to continue to keep it a viable service.
This is actually by design. We have a flag in our system that disables email notifications when people trip a certain follower ratio (among other parameters). This is to reduce potential annoyance. We also then check these accounts and sometimes disable them altogether.
For most people who are automating mass following, their whole point is to get the email sent, so they will get attention and possibly followed back. But we realize this is not ideal, because you may want the notification.
We have a plan to put more limitations in place.
Ev.
This is good to know. I hadn’t thought of option #3, which is: Twitter is doing this on purpose.
Thanks @ev for responding directly. I’m even more of a fan now.
I have to confess, I’m a little baffled by the idea of spammers on Twitter. You don’t see their updates on your timeline unless you follow them (and they can’t make you do that), they won’t really be able to send you more than one @reply before you get the chance to block them, and they can’t send you DMs (since they’re not following you). Is it just the idea of people-who-aren’t-people being on their Followers list that bothers folks?
I’ve seen this question asked a lot of times, and I think I have a pretty good explanation for it. I’ll put together a post that details how spammers use Twitter. It’s not so much to abuse Twitter or Twitterers, but that’s for the post.